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AMERICAN 
TOWNS and PEOPLE 




The White House is a sort of National shrine. 



American 
Towns and People 



b)' Harrison Rhodes 

Author of 
'High Life." "The Flight to Eden," etc. 



With Illustrations 




T^ew Tor\ 

Robert M. McBride ^^ Co. 

1920 



Copyright, 1920, by 
Robert M. McBride & Co. 






Copyright, 

1910, 1915, 1916, 1917. 1918, 1919, 1920, 

BY ELarper & Brothers 



Printed in the 
United States of America 



Published, 1920 



;0)CI.A604028 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Why Is a Bostonian? 1 

II. Who Is a Philadelphian? .... 27 

III. What Is a New-Yorker? .... 53 

IV. The Portrait of Chicago .... 79 
V. Washington, the Cosmopolitan . . 101 

VI. Baltimore 131 

VII. Is There a West? 153 

VIII. The Hotel Guest 175 

IX. The High Kingdom of the Movies . 199 

X, The American Child 227 

XI. The Society Woman 253 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The White House is a sort of National Shrine, 

Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

In Scollay Square the old tradition is less in evidence 9 

A street-corner seeker after truth 23 

An early morning rite 35 

The park affords charming vistas of the city beyond 59 

Vast aqueducts of traffic span the sky .... 75 

The Windy City on a windy day 85 

Chicago River, now a clear blue flood, flowing under 

Rush Street Bridge 97 

The austere towers of the Smithsonian Institute . 121 

Belair Market 129 

Traces of old Spain have a winning, half-pathetic 

charm 157 

A superannuated cowboy of about eighty . . . 171 
The old hotel office was what the forum perhaps 

was to Rome 185 

Stimulating a vampire with strains from Strauss . 203 

The reformer is an ever-present affliction . . . 219 
Women of the highest position feel deeply the beauty 

of the Bolshevik doctrine 255 



AMERICAN 
TOWNS and PEOPLE 



Why Is a Bostonian? 

THE author of the "Rollo Books," famous 
in that dim nineteenth century, wrote 
also the familiar "Lucy" and "Jonas Books," 
and another series less well known but in- 
valuable to the American who is curious- 
minded as to the social history of his country. 
Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of 
Knowledge (is the title not indicative of the 
pretty, harmless wit of those innocent days?) 
is the record of an early attempt to "see Amer- 
ica first." Marco Paul, after showing his na- 
tive city of New York to the excellent For- 
rester, at once his cousin and his tutor, visited 
In that relative's company, and in a hot and 
praiseworthy pursuit of knowledge, Ver- 
mont, the Springfield Armory, the forests 
of Maine, Boston, and the Erie Canal! 
Agreeable though all the volumes are, it is 
with the one upon the capital of Massachu- 
setts that we are here concerned, and in espe- 
cial with the chapter describing the visit of 
our travelers to the Bunker Hill Monument. 
"Who fought the battle on Bunker Hill?" 

Marco Paul asked his cousin Forrester. And 

1 



2 American Towns and People \ 

the author of the Adventures, who was, it is to I 
be noted, a Bostonian, comments in this aston- 1 
ishing way upon the young hero's ignorance. 
"Marco Paul," he says, "was a New York boy 
and did not know much about the battle of 
Bunker Hill." 

In 1843 the Revolution was not — one would 
now say — so very remote. The discovery is 
therefore the more significant that so long ago 
Boston was casting at New York the same re- 
proach of being "un-American" over which 
recent writers upon our civilization have so 
often become philosophical. Even after more 
than three-quarters of a century this acidity 
of tone about poor Marco Paul seems, at the 
very outset, to warn ofif any New-Yorker pre- 
paring to comment upon Boston. Perhaps 
the only apology for recklessness is reckless- 
ness itself. But it can at least be hinted that 
nowadays few New-Yorkers are New-York- 
ers; they are more commonly Ohioans. 

Since the Bostonian attitude toward New 
York has, by the accident of Marco Paul's 
faux pas upon Bunker Hill, already been in- 
troduced, it may be as well to go on, and to 
say that their feeling concerning the metro- 
polis, varying in quality and in emotional 
force, is one of the most curious and distin- 
guishing marks of our other cities. Philadel- 
phia, for example, ignores New York. Bos- 



Why Is a Bostonian? 3 

ton, on the other hand, is over-acutely 
conscious of it, hates it, despises it, loves its 
fleshpots and its Great White Way, and is 
ashamed of itself for doing so. All this, be 
it clearly understood, is said in praise rather 
than dispraise of Boston. But the facts are 
as they are. New York is perpetually upon 
Boston's nerves. To a foreign school-boy 
studying his atlas, Philadelphia w^ould seem 
to be considerably nearer the mouth of the 
Hudson than Boston; spiritually, if one may 
put it that way, the New England capital is 
far closer at hand. 

Until very recently it was possible to take 
a train from Boston to New York at a later 
hour than you could enter the subway and 
take a street-car for Cambridge — a fact 
which in the days before Harvard became a 
serious scholarly athletic college was often 
taken by belated and cheerful students of that 
institution as a sign direct from God. The 
development of what was known as the ''brass- 
bed train" between the two cities was evidence 
of an almost exacerbated anxiety to make the 
night transit endurable to overwrought, quiv- 
ering creatures returning to the shores of 
Massachusetts Bay. New York's tango roofs 
and pleasure palaces are the constant familiar 
haunt of Bostonians, yet it is never certain that 
the visitors are quite at their ease there. 



4 American Towns and People 

Even for the larkish trip to New York they 
bring certain grave prejudices and scientific 
ideas as to hygiene, which look very odd when 
unpacked in Manhattan. A Bostonian lady 
who was enthusiastic over New York's danc- 
ing-in-public restaurants, asserting that at 
home it was difficult regularly to secure this 
excellent health-exercise, caused considerable 
confusion one New-Year's Eve in a place of 
entertainment where, for that evening, only 
champagne was being served to patrons, by in- 
sisting upon having ''certified milk," which 
was, she stoutly maintained, the exact thing 
which could, without harming her, keep her 
going at three in the morning! 

It is no bad thing to pass from the image 
of the blousy beauty of Manhattan to one of 
the more frugal, nipped loveliness of Boston. 
Of course, the New-Yorker might well feel 
terror on his arrival in Boston, especially if 
it is after nightfall, in that strange Back Bay 
station where the electric lamps seem to pro- 
duce light without shedding it. He might 
reasonably fear that now justice is at last to 
be meted out to him. But when the first 
moment's panic is over he cannot but feel, as 
does doubtless the repatriate Bostonian, that 
the contrast is, for the time being at least, 
agreeable between what he has left and the 
cooler, grayer, more distinguished civiliza- 



Why Is a Bostonian? '5 

tion to which he has come. More distin- 
guished, in the accurate sense of that word, 
Boston is. While the national metropolis is 
at once vehement and vague, the New Eng- 
land capital is more measured, more clean- 
cut, more distinguished in the sense of having 
somehow so concentrated and clarified its spe- 
cial flavor that no one can for a moment doubt 
that — for better or worse — Boston is Bo'ston. 
When the sharp east wind has cleared away 
the vapors of Broadway, New York becomes 
less an actuality than a nightmare, and the 
northern town and its inhabitants are per- 
ceived to be standing very firmly on their own 
feet. 

These northern folk are passionately Bos- 
tonian — if they are passionately anything. It 
is pleasant for a moment to think of the lady 
living in Milton (a town of concentrated Bos- 
tonianism) who said of her son, whose career 
in the diplomatic service of his country had 
kept him in Paris for several years, that her 
only fear was that he should "get out of touch 
with Milton"! There was no confusion in 
her mind as to what is valuable in life. In 
this matter of values and belief in Boston the 
Society for the Preservation of New England 
Antiquities presented itself lately to great ad- 
vantage, gallantly going to the courts to pre- 
vent the alien — generally French-Canadian — 



6 American Towns and People 

from changing his name by the ordinary legal 
processes to that of any of Boston's old, his- 
toric families. There is a something here 
that insists on being like the Gilbert and Sul- 
livan operetta. And yet there is also some- 
thing magnificent — in a democracy — in the 
fact that you can become Smith, but never — 
s^all we say Romans? 

The intentions of this article — though hon- 
orable — are not topographical, yet something 
must be said of the look of Boston, for it is 
indicative of the town's inner quality — as in- 
deed to any one who has a feeling for the per- 
sonality of places is always the look of streets 
and squares and parks. New York sprawls; 
Boston really composes itself around Beacon 
Hill, and falls away from the lovely, peace- 
ful, brick quarter which surrounds the State 
House to the business district and the foreign 
North End on one side, and on the other to 
the Back Bay, the great South End, the huge, 
trailing suburbs that lie farther out, and fin- 
ally the New England country of which it is 
the metropolis and the commercial and spir- 
itual head. Somehow all through the town 
one gets hints of the great tributary province. 
There is a little old shop near the busy center 
where are displayed in the window slippery- 
elm and licorice sticks — does the sight not 
bring all New England's rocky fields and 



Why Is a Bostonian? 7 

white villages immediately before your eyes? 
The State House is to the eye as to the 
imagination the center of New England, and 
its gilded dome rising over the dark-green of 
the elms on the Common is typical of the un- 
exuberant, distinguished beauty of this North- 
ern Athens. There is probably quite as much 
gold upon the dome as would be necessary to 
decorate a New York restaurant. But in the 
former case there is no vulgar ostentation in 
its use. There is not even the kind of warm, 
barbaric lavishness, which incrusts the Vene- 
tian St. Mark's with the precious metal. The 
Bostonian State House seems instead to pro- 
claim that here in a shrewd, inclement climate 
and upon an arid, stony soil New England in- 
dustry and thrift have won a living and even 
wealth, and that when the occasion reasonably 
and sanely demands it New England can be 
lavish, almost spendthrift. You get a sense 
everywhere in Boston that they spend money 
upon public enterprises like state houses, 
opera-houses, art museums, and so forth be- 
cause there is a need to have such things and 
the money can be found, not because the 
money is there and there is a need to find some 
way to spend it — the latter being a much more 
characteristic American frame of mind. 
Reason rather than emotion guides New Eng- 
land expenditure, and the result is a cool and 



8 American Towns and People 

restrained distinction which the wanton cities 
of the South and West never quite attain. 

The old Boston dwellings upon Beacon 
Hill have this look of tempered luxury to per- 
fection. But what is more remarkable is the 
sobriety of domestic architecture in the newer 
districts, even in that decorous Common- 
wealth Avenue, in which the true Bostonian 
so fantastically asks the stranger to detect a 
note of the vulgarity of the notiveau riche. 
The Louis's have never wrought much of 
their French mischief in the Back Bay. A 
certain indigenous ugliness of architecture is 
preferred, solid and roomy, suggesting com- 
fort rather than slender, gilded elegance. 
There is not much foreign-lace nonsense at 
the windows; instead sometimes only simple, 
colored silk curtains drawn back to admit the 
sun and allow its due hygienic efifect. Where 
the outlook is toward the south, plants flour- 
ish in the Bostonian windows, and the passer- 
by instinctively feels that they actually grow 
there, and may even be watered by the ladies 
of the house instead of being merely a tem- 
porary installation by some expensive florist, 
to be lavishly and immediately replaced when 
neglect has withered them. 

The Bostonian interior, too, has something 
of this frugal quality, and may be recognized 
even in houses in the Middle West where the 




In Scollay Square the old tradition is less in evidence. 



Why Is a Bostonian? 9 

influence of the summer upon the North Shore 
has chastened the exuberance of taste natural 
in those remoter regions. There is something 
extremely pleasant in these sunny, cleanly 
scoured, airy, rather scantily furnished rooms, 
with big expanses of polished floor and well- 
worn furniture. They seem a little old-fash- 
ioned now, but this is merely a proof that taste 
struck Boston in something like the '70's of 
the last century, a little before it hit our other 
towns. 

There is, of course, a comic side to this 
frugality. One can imagine that in the early 
esthetic days the inexpensiveness of the jar of 
dried cattails was not without its appeal to the 
Bostonian decorator. No Bostonian thinks of 
spending his income; no New-Yorker thinks 
of spending merely his income: this is an ex- 
aggeration of something fundamentally true. 
The solid, piled-up, quiet wealth of Massa- 
chusetts is enormous — what the department- 
store experts call the "shopping power" of the 
regions within a forty-mile circle around the 
State House dome is some amazing propor- 
tion of the purchasing ability of the whole 
country. Yet Boston shops have never the air 
of inviting gay, wayward extravagance, the 
highest-priced ones are the least obtrusive, 
and the best always seem as if they could be 
instantly adapted to the sale of that tradi- 



lO American Towns and People 

tional black silk of our grandmothers which 
could ''stand alone." 

Bostonian spending is the result of mature 
and deliberate thought. It is rarely vulgar, 
but it knows nothing of the spendthrift's joie 
de vivre. People in New York may dine at 
the Ritz from obscure motives of economy, a 
vague feeling that a holiday for the servants 
at home may make them more efficient at 
other times. In Boston they eat in restaurants, 
one somehow feels, only after fasting and 
prayer. The name given at once to the latest 
smart hotel, "The Costly-Pleasure," is signifi- 
cant. There is even something a little grim 
about the phrase; it is almost as if the cost- 
liness of pleasure repelled instead of allured, 
as it does in less serious towns. Young men 
in evening dress do not idly stroll forth into 
the Bostonian streets with their overcoats care- 
lessly unbuttoned; it would give a false idea 
that a white-waistcoated Costly-Pleasure 
night-life is real Bostonianism. They hurry 
into motors and taxis and are about their busi- 
ness of dining and dancing seriously, almost 
half apologetically. There is, in short, very 
little bead on native Boston pleasure; it does 
not run to froth. 

The job of being very young and very gay 
and very foolish is left to Harvard undergrade 
uates. The proximity of a great supply of 



Why Is a Bostonian? ii 

young men with hearty appetites and strong 
dancing legs has made Boston fashion depend- 
ent and complaisant. The boys, in conse- 
quence, do all the things which gay young 
men do in light magazine fiction. They go 
to parties with a self-confident indifiference as 
to whether they have been invited or not. 
And there is a pretty story of some lads bring- 
ing suit-cases from Cambridge, in which they 
packed bottles of champagne, thus transferring 
supplies to the groves of Academe after the 
ball. It is no idle boast of the enthusiastic ad- 
vocates of Harvard education that youth there 
is more prepared to deal with the great world 
than are the students of a country college. 
The crimson thread of Harvard is woven into 
the very fabric of Bostonian existence; yet 
though it is perpetually there, it always seems 
exotic. 

The Bostonian opera — now suspended — 
was beautifully Bostonian; it presented in 
agreeable clearness the indigenous social qual- 
ity. The decoration of the house was quiet 
gray and gold, and the garb of the audience 
had on the whole something of the same so- 
briety. To this effect the native frugality 
doubtless contributed; on opera nights the 
streets leading to the edifice were thronged 
with intrepid women equipped to give battle 
to extravagance for music's sake, with galoshes 



12 American Towns and People 

and woolen scarfs — in this rude Northern cli- 
mate even "fascinators" must be woolen. If 
an Italian lady in evening dress could not af- 
ford a cab to the opera, she would quite sim- 
ply stay at home — and yet we prate of the love 
of music nourished in those sunny climes! 
This tribute to ladies in fascinators is not to 
be taken as meaning that there were not more 
luxurious women — and plenty — in the stalls 
and boxes — lovely, carriage-borne creatures, 
expensively dressed and well jeweled, prob- 
ably with the best old Brazilian stones; the 
point is that the total effect of the Bostonian 
audience was what it rarely is in opera-houses 
— subordinate to the stage. 

The opening night was an incredible event. 
Banquet parties of the gayest Bostonians had 
gathered to dine at an hour when food would 
poison the fashionable people of other cities, 
and the crush of carriages was beyond every- 
thing ever known, not because more people 
were going to the opera than go in other cities, 
but because, for the first time in the history 
of opera, every one wanted to arrive on time. 
The intervals of the performance were de- 
voted to a general promenade, in which many 
box-holders joined. Indeed, the attention 
paid to the occupants of boxes by the general 
audience was barely sufficient to induce fe- 
male loveliness to display its charms in the 



Why Is a Bostonian? 13 

traditional entr'acte manner — the ladies, if the 
truth be told, excited about the same amount 
of admiration as did the silver-gilt soda-water 
fountain which had been installed in the foyer. 
Here, it seemed to the irreverent outsider, the 
last word had been said. To have linked 
opera with the nut-sundae is to have, once for 
all, domesticated the gay, wayward institu- 
tion and made it Boston's harmless, admirable 
own. 

Light-minded comment, however, never 
discloses more than one side of a medal. The 
Bostonian opera showed, as a matter of fact, 
an admirable and sane sense of proportion. 
It was not the London, the Paris, or the New 
York opera. Why, pray, should it have been? 
It was opera of exactly the size and sumptu- 
ousness which it was likely that a town of 
Boston's extent and wealth could afford. It 
seemed something which could reasonably 
hope to exist, not the product of a spasmodic, 
hysterical effort such as occasionally brings 
fabulously paid singers to some of our smaller 
cities for a feverish May Festival or special 
operatic week. It was not a provincial enter- 
prise, because it was not aping any metropolis. 
It was the opera of the capital of New Eng- 
land, and it stood firmly, like many other 
neighboring institutions, upon its own sturdy, 
galoshed, Bostonian feet. It may, of course, 



14 American Towns and People 

always be open to question whether operatic 
art is not a too essentially artificial and emo- 
tional blend ever to please the Bostonian pub- 
lic as does the classically severe fare offered in 
Symphony Hall. But the Huntington Avenue 
opera was meant to stand or fall by the genu- 
ine music-loving support of its public. Even 
if the operatic dose was bitter, it was to be 
disguised by no "diamond horseshoe," by no 
soft Ionian ways. And who shall say that, 
though now suspended, the Boston opera has 
not had its nation-wide effect? Has not its 
gifted scene-painter already been chosen by 
New York to do the decorations for its lead- 
ing summer "girl-show," and does he not thus 
continue to enliven Boston? 

Culture has always seemed to the outsider a 
little rigorous in Boston. But as one looks 
over the whole field of American life one is 
inclined to say that desperate situations de- 
mand desperate remedies, and that to have 
caught culture in any trap, even just to have 
got it fighting in a corner, is an achievement. 

This is not altogether a question of art, 
though art is no doubt one of the town's chief 
preoccupations. Still less is it a question of 
producing art. It is no great reproach to Bos- 
ton that it is nowadays more a center of appre- 
ciation than creation. There is here no ques- 
tion of where the divine afflatus blows most 



Why Is a Bostonian? 15 

fiercely. New York is the mart, and that is 
about all there is to be said upon an already 
threadbare subject. 

Culture has, perhaps, more to do with edu- 
cation than with art. We study enough in 
America — that is, we go to schools and col- 
leges — but somehow, it may as well be ad- 
mitted frankly, we do not succeed in weaving 
our education into the very fabric of our daily 
social intercourse; we are not cultivated in 
the unobtrusive, easy way of the best English- 
men and Frenchmen. Now the newspaper 
humorists' best jokes hinge upon the alleged 
universality of Boston culture. And though 
the alien visitor may never find the infant who 
spouts Greek while brandishing his rattle, he 
will in simple justice admit that education has 
gone both far and deep in Boston, that slang 
is not the only dialect spoken, and that even 
among shop-girls and elevator-boys some 
traces of our original national speech are still 
to be detected. 

Here, parenthetically, it may be said that 
what is meant by Bostonians speaking English 
is the words themselves rather than the in- 
tonation and pronunciation with which they 
are uttered. The ''Boston accent" is of course 
famous and cannot but fail to give the keen- 
est pleasure to even a child traveling thither. 
The point to be made here is that it does not, 



i6 American Towns and People 

as the Bostonians appear to think, approxi- 
mate to the English accent of England any- 
more than any other of our national accents. 
The total elision of the R and the amazing 
broad, flat A— as in "Park Street" and "Har- 
vard College" — give to Bostonian speech a 
magnificently indigenous tang, hint at juniper 
and spruce forests and rocky fields and pump- 
kins and Thanksgiving and pie; make you 
feel again how triumphantly New England is 
new, and not old, English. But its vocabulary 
is, on the whole, the best chosen of all the 
American dialects. 

It is somewhat difficult to find in ordinary 
Bostonian speech the ten- and twelve-syllabled 
words of which it is popularly supposed to be 
exclusively composed. But the joke is so old 
that there must be something in it. As far 
back as Brook Farm it was alleged that they 
said, "Cut the pie from the center to the pe- 
riphery," and asked, "Is the butter within your 
sphere of influence?" But this was humor, 
as New England as a wintergreen lozenge. It 
was a by-product of an unashamed passion 
for education which distinguished American 
antebellum days. Even in the Middle West, 
when James Garfield, later to be President, 
with his friends in the little fresh-water col- 
lege of Hiram, indulged in "stilting," as they 
termed this humorous riding of the high- 



Why Is a Bostonian? 17 

horses of the language, they were in the Bos- 
tonian tradition. "Stilting" has perhaps dis- 
appeared. But there are here and there in- 
dications of the survival of the English of a 
robuster period. The old lady who said that 
she didn't, after all, know that Bostonians were 
so "thundering pious," produced with the 
phrase all the effect of an Elizabethan oath. 
She made you feel that Bostonian culture was 
no mere thin affair of yesterday. 

It should be acknowledged handsomely 
that there is a certain amenity of tone in the 
town which comes not so much from exuber- 
ant good nature as from a reasoned belief in 
life's higher interests. The policeman who in 
Commonwealth Avenue used to stop prome- 
nading strangers and urge them to turn and 
admire the sunset was extending the city's hos- 
pitality no less to nature's beauty than to the 
visitors. He was notably Bostonian in that 
he was ashamed neither of the sunset nor of 
his belief that pleasure was to be derived from 
its contemplation. His culture was genuinely 
a part of his existence, of his everyday life. 
And culture is unquestionably a more integral 
part of Boston's normal existence than of our 
other cities' lives. Only in Boston, to imagine 
a concrete and pleasing example, could a lady, 
if she were so inclined, be distinguished by a 
love for extreme decolletage and for early 



1 8 American Towns and People 

Buddhistic philosophy. There is, in Boston, 
nothing essentially inharmonious in such a 
combination. 

In any case, variations from a standard type 
are not so severely penalized in Boston as in 
other parts of our country. Eccentricity is 
almost encouraged; to take but one example, 
old age is openly, almost brazenly, permitted. 
Just how they kill the old off in New York 
is not known, but they get rid of them some- 
how. Boston, on the contrary, has famous old 
people, especially old ladies, and the commu- 
nity's pride in them is not merely that they 
have been able so long to withstand the Bos- 
ton climate. These veterans do not eat their 
evening meal up-stairs on a tray; instead, their 
visit to a dinner-table honors and enlivens the 
board. There is something extraordinarily 
exciting in meeting the lady whose witticisms 
were famous when you were almost a child 
and finding her still tossing them off so vigor- 
ously and gayly that you can with a clear con- 
science encourage your own children to grow 
up with the promise that when they are old 
enough to dine out they, too, shall be privi- 
leged to go to Boston and hear really good 
talk. 

The New England capital cherishes affec- 
tionately links with the past. There was un- 
til lately for some favored people the possi- 



Why Is a Bostonian? 19 

bllity of going to tea in a faded, old-fashioned 
Boston drawing-room, from the windows of 
which you saw the sunset across the Charles 
River basin, and hearing wise, graceful, ten- 
der talk that made the literary past of Eng- 
land and America for almost three-quarters 
of a century seem like the pleasant gossip of 
to-day. The delight of such moments in the 
fading light was poignant — the tears would 
come into one's eyes at the realization that it 
was all too good to be true and also too good 
to last. 

The respect for the person or the thing 
which has become "an institution" is always 
to be noted with interest in our American life. 
And for an evening newspaper — a vulgar and 
fly-blown thing elsewhere — to have a half-sa- 
cred character is possible only in Boston. The 
publication in question is not thought of as a 
mere private enterprise; it is integrally a part 
of the whole community's life, its policy and 
its grammar are both constant matters for the 
searchings of the New England conscience. 
It is even solemnly asserted — by those who 
should know — that more Bostonians die on 
Friday than on any other day because they 
thus make sure of being in the special Satur- 
day night obituary notices! To pay, even in 
the date of death, such a tribute to the Bos- 
tonian tradition is magnificent. 



20 American Towns and People 

But if one is to speak of institutions, there 
is of course Harvard College, without which 
it is impossible to imagine Boston and Bos- 
ton culture. Changes in Cambridge are 
changes in Boston. For a ten or twenty year 
period there has been a determined and con- 
scientious attempt across the Charles to break 
down the old barriers and traditions which 
kept Harvard from being democratic and effi- 
cient in the modern way. What has been ac- 
complished in Cambridge is for the purposes 
of this article less important than what has 
been wrought in Boston. Undergraduates 
may take innovation lightly, but in the fast- 
nesses of clubs upon Beacon Hill irate old gen- 
tlemen declare that Harvard is now nothing 
but a **slap-shoulder college," and younger 
philosophers of a more suavely cynical turn 
of mind deplore the out-Yaleing of Yale, and 
the rough, boyish virility, wholly unconnected 
with education, which, they maintain, now 
distinguishes Cambridge rather than New 
Haven. They tell you that "college spirit," 
with all its attendant vulgarities of tone, is 
rampant where the college elms once stood, 
and there are no longer any disloyal sons of 
Harvard. This is the pleasant, crabbed, char- 
acteristic way in which Boston tells you that, 
after all, it is moving with the times, and that 
if a big, regenerative movement as some be- 



I 



Why Is a Bostonian? 21 

lieve is sweeping over the country, it will have 
Harvard men in the very first battle-line. Bos- 
ton may bewail changes in the nation, but it 
knows they cannot happen without changes in 
Harvard. Centuries of history prove it. 

These centuries of history are singularly 
alive in Boston. The reference is not to Fan- 
euil Hall or the Old South Church or any 
of the historic spots about which our modern 
Marco Pauls from Michigan and Oregon 
know so much. What is meant is the amaz- 
ing sense of a continuous social connection 
back to the very English roots of the New 
England tree. 

An unwise stranger, sitting at ease in a Bos- 
tonian club one day, ventured the observation, 
not deeply original or stimulating, that Bos- 
ton was remarkable for the way in which the 
old Bostonian families had kept the money 
and the position and were still, as it were, in 
the saddle. The Bostonians looked at one an- 
other. They murmured a negative, and the 
faintest trace of embarrassment seemed to 
creep over the group. The confused stranger 
was so sure that his remark, if banal, was true 
that he thought they had not understood. He 
carefully explained again. The negative was 
now sharper and the embarrassment deeper. 

"I don't think you quite understand — " be- 
gan one of the Bostonians; and it is possible 



22 American Towns and People 

that the miserable stranger might have tried 
to explain still again had not his friend gone 
on: 

"You see, there are almost no Bostonians 
living here;" — he paused for an instant — "al- 
most all the Bostonian families went back 
home at the time of the Revolution. The in- 
habitants here now, with the exception of per- 
haps four families, are all Salem people!" 

There is no way of commenting upon such 
an episode ; there it is, in sheer Bostonian beau- 
ty, for such as are worthy of seeing its Bos- 
tonianism. The tormented un-Bostonian mind 
will possibly seek refuge in the thought of the 
club itself. (One does not say clubs, although 
it is just possible to maintain that there are 
two in Boston.) Its grave, suave distinction 
can only be savored by many visits and by 
quiet, meditative hours. But once you have 
felt its charm you will henceforth find the or- 
dinary American organization more like a 
hotel or a railway station than like a club. To 
sign no checks, but instead to receive an un- 
obtrusive and unitemized bill at the end of 
the month, is at once to gain the impression 
that you are being notably treated like a gen- 
tleman. The impression is deepened by gen- 
uine blue Canton ware, by waiters of a dig- 
nified and ancient kindliness which has else- 
where disappeared from American life, and 



Bh . n^Nij m 




A street' corner seeker after truth. 



JVhy Is a Bostonian? 23 

by food excellent in that strange, tempered 
New England way — oysters from the club's 
own planted waters, and peppers and pepper 
sauces dated and labeled like vintage wines. 

The right to belong to such a club is, as it 
were, beyond the power of the mere individual 
to acquire — it is something with or without 
which he is born. The club, indeed, has been 
described as an "Institution for the Congeni- 
tally Eminent." But within its doors you 
catch furtive hints of an inaccessible inner 
eminence — caused possibly by Bostonian in- 
stead of Salem descent — which makes even its 
exclusiveness seem common. There is a fabu- 
lous story of an eighth-degree Bostonian who 
referred lightly to his rare visits to this holy 
of club holies, of which he was, as it were 
automatically, a member, and said that it was 
"at times a pleasure to be franchement ca- 
naille/' In this wind-swept Northern clime 
the phrase in the French language somehow 
seems to accentuate the odd, bitter, cultivated 
venom of a description of the greatest Bos- 
tonian exclusiveness as "frankly of the gut- 
ter." Let Ohio and Oklahoma pause and 
think before they too quickly describe our 
American civilization as twentieth-century 
democracy. 

Bostonian democracy is not the spontane- 
ous product of naturally genial'temperaments; 



24 American Towns and People 

it is rather a thing extorted from oneself by 
will and fierce conviction. But will, belief, 
and a conscience can make the Northern city 
burst into flames. In Boston least of any- 
where in the North does the passion for human 
freedom which brought on our own Civil War 
seem a dead or forgotten thing. And even 
now the black brother — though modern 
thought judges him to be not quite a brother 
in the old sense — can still count on a helping 
hand and some belief in his future. It is well 
for the visitor to Boston to sit for a peaceful 
half-hour under the elms of the Common and 
think of New England's part in the national 
life. Geographically and spiritually New 
England is a little apart. It is a tight, small 
province, and it is a long way from there to 
Washington in ordinary times. It is in the 
crises that Boston becomes most intensely 
American; then you realize how far-flung is 
the battle-line of the New England conscience. 
One never quite forgets in Boston the great 
moments in our history when the country has 
kindled at New England's burning heart. 

Modern workers, who believe that charity 
and good deeds begin at home, sometimes 
scoflf at the Bostonian "long-distance philan- 
thropy." And they cite you the story of the 
lady found wildly weeping because she had 
just heard how cruel they were to cats in Per- 



Why Is a Bostonian? 25 

sia in the thirteenth century! She is indeed a 
shade fantastical, poor lady; but in the mo- 
notonous dead levels of American life we can 
be grateful to Boston for her. 

Indeed, is not gratitude, after all, the chief 
feeling one has for Boston? Nipped and sour 
though the fruit sometimes may be of the tree 
which grows upon her thin soil in her bitter 
east wind, does not every descendant of the 
old American stock, and every one who has 
in his Americanization made the traditions of 
that stock his own, know that the core of that 
fruit is sound, and the cider that might be 
pressed from it the best of our native wines, 
if one may put it that way? The packed 
trains that carry Thanksgiving travelers to 
Boston seem somehow symbolic. The statis- 
tics are not at hand — when are statistics ever 
at hand when they are needed? — but it must 
be that these trains are more heavily 
freighted than those that go to any other of 
our great American cities. Whether we are 
from New England or not, Boston is for many 
of us, in a deeper sense, our "home town." 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 

A STRANGER recently in Philadelphia 
on business bethought himself, in his 
friendless state, of a one-time casual acquaint- 
ance who had given as his address a Philadel- 
phia club. From his hotel the visitor tele- 
phoned the club and asked if he might speak 
with Mr. John Doe. The telephone-clerk 
asked the inquirer's name, and after a decent 
interval replied that Mr. Doe was not in the 
club. The inquiry was then made whether 
Mr. Doe was in town and likely to be reached 
by a note sent to the club. The clerk politely 
regretted that he was not allowed to give any 
such information concerning a member of the 
club. The visitor protested, and was finally 
allowed to speak to the secretary's office. He 
gave his name again and, in answer to what 
seemed an odd query, that of his hotel. He 
explained that the shortness of his stay in 
Philadelphia was the reason of his anxiety to 
know whether he was likely to get hold of 
Mr. Doe during it or not. The secretary also 
politely regretted his inability so to violate 
the privacy of any member's life. The visitor, 

27 



28 American Towns and People 

now vaguely feeling that he was being treated 
like a dun or a detective, protested in slight 
exasperation that his designs upon Mr. Doe 
were honorable and purely social — that in- 
deed he felt so sure of Mr. Doe's desire to 
welcome him to Philadelphia as to be inclined 
to insist upon some disclosure of even a club- 
member's whereabouts. The secretary now 
grew the least bit weaker, moved eithef by an 
inner kindliness or by some note of social au- 
thority in the visitor's voice, and at last grudg- 
ingly said that although the rules of the club 
were perfectly clear upon the point, he would 
as a courtesy consult one or two members of 
the board of governors who happened at that 
moment to be in the smoking-room. There 
was again a decent if tedious interval, and the 
secretary's voice was once more heard. He 
reiterated that it was contrary to the rules of 
the club to give information as to the where- 
abouts of any member, but that it had been 
decided that, in this special case, an exception 
might be made. He was pleased to inform 
the visitor that Mr. John Doe had died in 
December of the preceding year! 

The first comment to be made upon this au- 
thentic anecdote is that, in spite of the secre- 
tary's courteous pretense, the rules of the club 
were not violated by the disclosure of a mem- 
ber's whereabouts, since the inquirer after Mr. 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 29 

John Doe was still left, theologically speak- 
ing, with a choice between two possible ad- 
dresses. The second observation, perhaps 
more profoundly significant, is that death 
scarcely increases* the inaccessibility of a well- 
born Philadelphian. 

The tradition of exclusiveness is one of the 
most striking features of the Philadelphian 
picture. And if this exclusiveness, which 
keeps the well-born safely apart from the not- 
well-born, makes it difficult for even a Phila- 
delphian to know Philadelphia, how much 
more nearly impossible does it render such a 
task for the un-Philadelphian, who must de- 
pend upon occasional visits and casual gossip 
for his information. However genial Phila- 
delphian hospitality may have been, the 
stranger will find that whatever "set" he may 
be in, it is, as it were, the wrong set for any 
general survey of the great town. The alien 
must frankly preface his impressions of Phila- 
delphia and its people with a confession of 
foredoomed ignorance of his subject. 

Long our second largest city, and even now 
our third, Philadelphia is nevertheless, in the 
strangest fashion, for most Americans a terra 
incognita. It is conveniently situated, and yet, 
almost symbolically, the through trains run 
round it and not into it. It makes no effort to 
attract the stranger. It advertises no historic 



30 American Towns and People 

attractions, it sets no Broadway ablaze, it beats 
no tom-toms. Of all our American towns it 
is the most self-contained. It has almost none 
of our traditional eagerness for and sensitive- 
ness to criticism. There is in it nothing of 
the hurrah-boys' braggadocio which so often 
marks our American "civic spirit." Philadel- 
phia does not assert that it is in any way an 
admirable town; it merely feels that Philadel- 
phia exists, always has existed, and always will 
exist, and that in a confused, tumultuous, and 
vulgar world this is the one uncontrovertible 
fact, the one solid rock where there is a sure 
foothold. 

The true Philadelphian neither admires nor 
dislikes New York; he simply does not know 
that New York exists. The great lady who 
managed with difficulty to remember the 
metropolis as "the place where one goes to take 
the steamer for Europe" was expressing with 
a conscious, satirical exaggeration the actual 
Philadelphian feeling. And a pretty, moroc- 
co-bound set of address-books, purchased 
lately at the best Philadelphia stationer's, 
gives a charming concreteness to this same 
point of view; the three little volumes are 
labeled "Philadelphia," "London," and 
"Paris" — this is the world as Philadelphia 
sees it I 

Though the social recognition thus grace- 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 31 

fully extended to London and Paris is denied 
to Boston and New York, it might possibly 
be granted to the ancient aristocracy of the 
South. You feel instinctively that lovely, 
proud, faded Carolinian Charleston is per- 
haps the only American town with which 
Philadelphia would feel at ease. Her St. Ce- 
cilia Ball might rank with the Philadelphia 
Assemblies of an earlier, happier day, before 
Pittsburg and North Broad Street had fought 
their way into the once sacred lists. And it 
is pleasant upon investigation to discover cor- 
roborative traces of an agreeable earlier con- 
nection. The Philadelphia Club is domiciled 
in the stately old mansion which a rich 
Charlestonian built that he might pass the 
winter seasons in the Northern city, and the 
famous Madeira which bears his name is of- 
fered you in the houses where the Philadel- 
phian tradition still beautifully lingers. You 
have only to try vainly to imagine this gentle- 
man of the old regime settling upon the Bos- 
tonian Beacon Hill to realize how far toward 
the South the Pennsylvanian metropolis lies. 

Indeed, the Southern note in Philadelphia 
is unmistakable. It is to be found in the spa- 
cious look of the old houses, and in a certain 
lavishness of architectural design in the pub- 
lic edifices of Colonial days. Independence 
Hall is sumptuous; you have only to compare 



J2 American Towns and People 

it with Boston's Old State House and its fru- 
gal, chastened beauty to realize that Philadel- 
phia is by comparison a rich, care-free city 
upon a fat Southern soil. This softer note is 
to be found, too, in the gay chatter of the 
Philadelphian ladies, and in the pleasant pres- 
ence of a well-mannered black population, 
and a generous, fat cuisine. The local darky 
has the look of having been established for 
generations by the Schuylkill, and of having 
devoted a great deal of that time to the prepa- 
ration of terrapin and the decanting of vintage 
wines. He concerns himself naturally with 
food. In the eighteen-forties, when dashing 
resorts known as "oyster-cellars" were intro- 
duced, it is to be noted that the proprietors 
were blacks. And even now the caterer who 
has, as it were, the inherited right to direct 
the entertainments of the real Philadelphians 
is an ancient, white-haired gentleman of color. 
Food is always the fashion in Philadelphia. 
The Philadelphian air is everywhere redolent 
of good living; even the stranger arriving at 
the railway station instinctively thinks of the 
nearest good restaurant and the next meal. It 
is true that Benjamin Franklin, who is almost 
tutelary in Philadelphia, proudly said, "My 
friends, any one who can subsist upon saw- 
dust pudding and water, as I can, needs no 
man's patronage," and it is possible that the 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 33 

philosophical gentlemen who still meet in his 
quaint old red-brick house, far down-town, 
may be nourished by some such sparse diet, 
as dry as their discussions. But, in spite of 
Dr. Franklin, nowhere else in the country is 
good eating so ancient and stately a tradition. 
Nowadays, of course, all our grill-roomed 
towns struggle for a culinary standing, but it 
is well to remember darker national days; a 
Philadelphian writer in the early part of the 
last century tells of barbarous regions of 
America where a favorite dish was sausage 
stewed in chocolate! Against such gastro- 
nomic abominations Philadelphia has through 
the years stood firm. To-day the proudest 
hostesses of America have their terrapin 
brought from Philadelphia. Even the me- 
tropolis, greedy and luxurious at table, speaks 
with bated breath of the feasts of Lucullus 
spread by the Delaware; it is left for Balti- 
more, sitting in the profusion of tribute which 
her great bay of Chesapeake pours upon 
her, alone to dispute culinary preeminence. 
Tradesmen throughout the country recom- 
mend their establishments as "Philadelphia 
Markets," while "Philadelphia Chickens" 
and "Philadelphia Ice Cream" are terms 
used as a guarantee of excellence and richness. 
Marketing is a serious afifair where eating is 
serious ; it is not so long ago that the most dig- 



34 American Towns and People 

nified Philadelphian gentlemen, top-hatted 
heads of households, themselves accompanied 
the market-basket on its morning round. 

With the alarming increase of non-alcohol- 
ism in the country, it has of course become 
possible nowadays to speak in praise of a rich, 
groaning, and teetotal table. But the Phila- 
delphia epicure has not yet moved the whole 
distance with the times. The bouquet of Ma- 
deira still lingers faintly around the local ma- 
hogany tree. At the "English Rooms" in Fun- 
chal — as the club there is quaintly called — it 
was until 1918 a matter of serious discussion 
whether the taste for the island's wine would 
ever revive in Philadelphia or was slowly 
dying. Almost anywhere else in the world 
such talk would have seemed like a labored 
reconstruction of the eighteenth century; even 
in Philadelphia itself the courteous ceremo- 
nials of Madeira-drinking have always some- 
thing of autumn's loveliness about them; you 
feel that such customs must with the years 
pass — if, indeed, anything can quite pass in 
Philadelphia. 

There has been no Madeira since 1861, so 
the pink-faced, white-haired gentlemen of the 
old school tell you; and since you cannot lay 
down vintages and thus continue your cellar, 
it is small wonder that a pretty taste in wine 
is becoming rarer. But here and there in the 




An early morning rite. 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 35 

old houses famous old wines, with labels writ- 
ten in a cramped, old-fashioned hand hung 
upon the bottles, are still put upon the table 
after dinner, and stories are told of famous old 
gentlemen who could by tasting tell nine out 
of eleven strains of wine which had gone into 
a blend. In such mellow atmosphere the 
years seem to slip quietly back, and even the 
outer barbarian catches something of the 
Philadelphian content — a little of the Phila- 
delphian feeling that the world outside Phila- 
delphia must be an odd place into which it 
could be neither very safe nor very pleasant 
to venture; that when the right Madeira is 
upon the sideboard, the fire and candles lit 
and the curtains drawn, that outer world is a 
world well lost. 

The traditions of the Philadelphian cuisine 
are not only preserved around the sacred 
kitchen-ranges of the best families, but are 
kept up by various public organizations os- 
tensibly devoted to other purposes. There is 
something suggestive of the banquets of the 
London City Companies in the dinners, for 
example, of the Philadelphian insurance com- 
panies. And pleasant customs have grown up 
through the long Philadelphian years. The 
insurance company which is popularly and 
prettily called "The Green Tree" was dining 
•■ — and dining well — when the news came of 



36 American Towns and People 

the death of Washington, and to this day a 
toast to his memory is drunk each month by 
the assembled company. 

In Philadelphia one is not displeased that 
even the memory of the first President is fra- 
grant of good cooking. The memoirs of the 
days when the town was the nation's capital 
are very considerably concerned with Mr. 
Washington's dinners, served at four precisely, 
at a table decorated with silver salvers and 
alabaster mythological figures two feet high! 

There are in Philadelphia various social 
and club organizations devoted almost exclu- 
sively to culinary aims. At one of these a 
dinner cooked by the members themselves is 
the greatest tribute which can be paid to a 
lovely lady visiting the city. And the "Fish- 
ing Company on the Schuylkill," now com- 
pelled by the pollution of that once limpid 
stream to eat fish only, not to catch them, is a 
historic institution, no mere club. Most of 
us remember some blithe collegiate indiscre- 
tion, committed under the influence of "Fish- 
house Punch." But not all know the pleasant 
history of the organization from which the 
beverage takes its name, which has so long 
existed with almost extra-territorial rights, a 
corporation vying in pride and dignity with 
the commonwealth of Pennsylvania itself. 
There is an incrediblv fat and serious volume 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 37 

giving the annals of the Fish-house through 
the long, peaceful Philadelphian years. 
Reading it, you are not surprised at the seri- 
ous way in which membership in such an in- 
stitution is regarded. There is a period of 
novitiate, during which Fish-housers-to-be 
must humbly appear at a certain number of 
fixed feastings of the company — a genuine 
Philadelphian scandal of a year or so ago was 
of a wayward young gentleman who, having 
started round the world, brazenly refused to 
come back to the Schuylkill from Cochin 
China to attend a yearly fish-eating, and thus 
lost the membership which would have been 
the crown of steadier and maturer years. 

Here is an admirable example of Philadel- 
phian valuations; until you can see the boy's 
behavior as criminal folly you are unqualified 
for any profitable study of the Philadelphian 
social structure. However fantastic the 
local customs or prejudices may seem to the 
stranger, they are genuine to the native. 

A famous and agreeable example of Phila- 
delphianism is the geographical restrictions as 
to the district where polite life may be led; 
you may search the world without finding 
anything comparable to the feeling in Phila- 
delphia concerning the regions north of Mar- 
ket Street. To the dweller in the permitted 
quarter of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and 



38 American Towns and People 

Pine" Streets, the mere existence of creatures 
in that outer darkness seems incredible — with 
the one curious exception to be noted, that if 
you belong to certain old Quaker families you 
may live in Arch Street, just over the border. 
Otherwise the northern districts might be des- 
ert land where a colony of rich lepers have 
built their palatial marble huts. When the 
Philadelphian opera was transferred from 
the delightful old red-brick Academy to the 
vulgar new structure in North Broad Street 
there were gallant ladies of the old school who 
swore roundly they would never attend it, 
and high-bred creatures who, though weak 
enough to go to the opening performance, 
nevertheless fainted away as they, for the first 
time in their lives, crossed Market Street and 
breathed this vile new air. 

There is an apocryphal story of a delightful 
and famous old lady who had seen here and 
there at afternoon parties a younger woman 
whose look somehow seemed to win friendli- 
ness. Finding herself one day descending 
some of the best white-marble door-steps in 
company with this agreeable stranger, the 
elder lady suggested driving her home, and 
they stepped together into the snug brougham, 
drawn by a sleek, fat horse, and driven by an 
equally sleek, fat coachman. 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 39 

''James, we will drive Mrs. X home," was 
the only order given. 

The brougham started, and for a period, 
while its occupants chatted pleasantly, wan- 
dered somewhat aimlessly through the very 
best streets. At last its owner, vaguely dis- 
turbed, said, apologetically: 

"I am afraid James doesn't know where you 
live. It is annoying; he always knows where 
everybody lives. I apologize for having to 
ask such a question, but where do you live, 
my dear?" 

Her charming companion smiled, and then 
mentioned a number in North Broad Street — 
it may even have been Spring Garden Street — 
an address in the unmentionable regions. The 
Philadelphian — for we can no longer so desig- 
nate the younger woman — took the blow gal- 
lantly. The pleasant chat was resumed, but 
for at least a quarter of an hour more the 
sleek, fat horse still ambled aimlessly through 
the very best district. At last the elder lady 
rose to the situation. She tapped the glass, 
and, as the sleek, fat coachman halted, said: 

"I wonder if you would mind telling James 
yourself where to drive us, dear? I'm afraid 
he would think it very odd if I myself were 
to give him an address north of Market 
Street!" 



40 American Towns and People 

The one thing unforgivable in Philadelphia 
is to be new, to be different from what has 
been. North Broad Street, for example, may 
be in every way a better place to live in than 
Walnut Street, but no one has ever lived there. 
Hence, no one ever can. The Philadelphian 
likes to know what to expect; novelty dis- 
turbs his contentment, ruffles him'. A "society 
circus," for example, was suggested a few 
years ago, but given up. "It would be ex- 
tremely amusing" was the dictum of a social 
arbiter, "but it would be too new to please 
Philadelphia." 

A lady once asked why it was that she al- 
ways saw just the same people at the windows 
of a certain club. "People! Those are not 
people," was the gravely ironic reply. "They 
are painted on the glass of the windows I" It 
is even possible to imagine this an ideal ar- 
rangement for a Philadelphia club — that as 
young men attain the age at which they come 
into their congenital right to sit at windows 
the club artist should install their portraits in 
correct and easy attitudes. 

Of course, the look of the town has perforce 
changed somewhat with the years; near the 
center Chicagoesque buildings rudely scrape 
the serene, exclusive Philadelphian sky. But 
there are streets and squares in plenty where 
old red-brick houses with white-marble steps 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 41 

keep affectionate hold upon the past. Only 
lately some of the quieter byways were util- 
ized by moving-picture actors for a drama of 
London life — a most authentic proof of the 
continuity of the English tradition. Is it fan- 
tastic to wonder if the day may not soon be 
here when the British "movies" themselves 
will be forced to go to Philadelphia to find 
London streets, unchanged and unvexed by 
modernization? The link with the Colonial 
days is never obtrusive in Philadelphia (noth- 
ing is obtrusive there), but you can still find 
elderly people who speak of the voyage west- 
ward from England as "going out" to Amer- 
ica. Only this year a negro bootblack in a 
barber-shop spoke of a gentleman's silk hat 
as a "beaver"! And a mere debutante, a child 
in white tulle, enthusiastically pro-Allies and 
pro-English, said this winter that she hoped 
people now saw what a mistake they made in 
1776! 

The only thing that can wholly go out of 
existence in Philadelphia is Philadelphia it- 
self — if one may venture on paradox. This, 
some pessimists say, is happening in the tre- 
mendous exodus to country homes in the fat, 
well-groomed country that lies correctly along 
the Main Line. The trolley-cars have made 
the narrow old streets of the town pande- 
monium. But the motor arrived just in the 



42 American Towns and People 

nick of time to keep country life from being 
really country life. These so-called country 
people think nothing of driving twenty miles 
to town to dine and dance. So, for the time 
being at least; it is only as if Chestnut, Wal- 
nut, Spruce, and Pine Streets had been ex- 
tended into the lovely green suburbs. There 
their solid elegance and their grave decorum 
still hold sway, and Philadelphia is still 
Philadelphia. 

Not even youth prevents a Philadelphian's 
being Philadelphian. It was a gay young dog 
who commented upon a painting exhibited 
at the academy: ^'I don't think it is worth 
much as a portrait. No Philadelphian ever 
sat with her legs crossed." And here may be 
considered boards of censors of moving pic- 
tures, the newest and most ridiculous gauges 
of public morality. It is significant that a 
hero who in other towns had roguishly put a 
wet head from between the curtains of a 
shower-bath was not permitted to do so before 
Philadelphian audiences. The example is 
taken at random out of probable hundreds. 
The point is that the note of Philadelphian 
decorum is strongly struck. 

But Philadelphian decorum requires ex- 
planation. It derives, of course, partly from 
the Quaker tradition. But even in the eight- 
eenth-century days there were what were 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 43 

quaintly called "Wet Quakers," ladles who 
wickedly wore laces and ribands. And as to 
Church-of-England circles, it is well to re- 
member that the funds for the lovely steeple 
of Christ Church were the product of lot- 
teries. Even now the town has, as it were, 
the paradoxical reputation of being both fast 
and slow. Its inner circles are understood to 
be committed to friskiness and agreeable dev- 
ilments of all kinds. But it is also understood 
that all this liveliness must be kept, as it were, 
in the family. Misconduct of all descriptions 
is quite permissible, but only among the well- 
born and in the hallowed privacy of the home. 

There is, of course, a certain amount of pub- 
licity even in the best Philadelphian lives. 
Noblesse oblige. It is, for example, the fash- 
ion to sip and dance on "opera night" at the 
restaurant of the newest and smartest hotel. 
But the care with which the tables are assigned 
to the well-born, and the decorous, gilded ele- 
gance of the whole scene, rob the occasion of 
that welcome vulgarity which elsewhere in 
the world makes restaurants preferred to 
homes. 

Whatever may be the vivacity of small, 
discreet parties given for well-seasoned 
women of the world, the great balls are al- 
ways for debutantes, to honor sweet, girlish 
life iri white muslin and blue ribbons. Here 



4-4 American Towns and People 

again the ''Southern note" is evident. It is 
true that often these innocently aimed func- 
tions are done upon a scale of splendor which 
recalls Imperial Rome. To celebrate the en- 
trance of a young Philadelphian maiden into 
society orchids bloom, tropic birds warble in 
expensive jungles, and rare butterflies are re- 
leased to flutter through one mad night. Such 
events, duly recorded in the nation's press, are 
public testimony to the city's wealth, its abil- 
ity to compete in magnificence and lavishness 
with the wanton metropolis itself. But hav- 
ing occasionally during the winter season thus 
combined civic duty with pleasure, Philadel- 
phian liveliness resumes its deep, dark flow. 

The natural result of this guarding of gayety 
like a sacred flame is the Sabbath calm which 
both traditionally and actually broods over 
the great city. For the stranger this is most 
to be noted in the deserted evening streets. 
Philadelphians will promenade no nocturnal 
sidewalks. When they venture forth to places 
of entertainment they scurry as if to cover; 
and if, upon the return, they stop for supper, 
they take to restaurants as to the trenches. 
The town, in short, does not approve of dark- 
ness — it would take a midnight sun to make 
midnight popular in Philadelphia. 

Perhaps the most significant thing about the 
one great Philadelphian revel, the New Year's 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 45 

"Mummers' Parade," is that it takes place at 
eight in the morning 1 Elsewhere in the coun- 
try exhausted millions are still faint and wan 
from the pleasures of the night before, but 
Philadelphia, having already passed the night 
in revels, goes forth like a somewhat dissi- 
pated lark to celebrate a festival of Dionysos 
at the crack of dawn. Between eight and nine 
thousand take part, members of various Mum- 
mers' clubs, "Silver Crown," "Lobster," 
"Charles Klein," "Sauerkraut Band," "D. D. 
Oswald," "Zuzu," "Jack Rose Accordion 
Band," and a dozen other as fantastically 
named organizations. The amount spent on 
rich and elaborate costumes runs into the 
hundreds of thousands. The result is a popu- 
lar rejoicing both spontaneous and gay. This 
year the railways began to advertise it, and 
ran special trains even from New York for it. 
But even so, it is still true, broadly speaking, 
that no one outside of Philadelphia has ever 
heard of it. Why, pray, should any one? 
Philadelphia would ask. This obscurity is the 
Philadelphianishness of it — unless you can 
here also vaguely discern some philosophic 
truth concerning the wild follies of a quiet 
community, once the bridle is loosed. 

Of course, in so great a population there are 
a certain number of graceless pleasure-seek- 
ers. But in spite of them public amusements 



46 American Towns and People 

languish. The characteristic aspect of a 
Philadelphia theater is gloom until the end of 
the week comes, when the whole town with its 
wife or its best girl goes forth for a traditional 
Saturday night's pleasure. Until then the 
home holds undisputed sway. 

Indeed, the Philadelphian boasts, or con- 
fesses, if you prefer the word, that his is a 
"city of homes." And the ''homes" look very 
snug, very homelike indeed, especially at dusk 
as one strolls through the red-brick streets and 
sees the lamps lit and the curtains drawn upon 
comfortable, old-fashioned rooms. But the 
impertinent curiosity of the un-Philadelphian 
insists on wondering what a Philadelphian 
home, more accurately and spiritually, is. Is 
it, for example, devoted to the carpet slipper 
and the good book? Or is it a center from 
which radiate moral forces making for pri- 
vate or public virtue? The foreign observer 
must reluctantly confess that neither literary 
and artistic culture nor a high civic standard 
seems very obviously to be the characteristic 
Philadelphian note. If people read books in 
those comfortable homes by those pleasant fire- 
sides, you somehow suspect that they fall 
asleep over them. There is, of course, nothing 
low-bred about Philadelphian ignorance; it 
is rather like the gay, courteous lack of edu- 
cation which distinguishes the South. Every 



I Who Is a Philadelphian? 47 

one who is any one has learned what might be 
termed the necessary elegancies — as one learns 
good table-manners. And it is quite possible 

jthat Shakespeare and Jane Austen — to choose 
at random — may be better known in Philadel- 
phia than anywhere else in the country. But 
passionate and omnivorous general reading 
there is not. Book-shops are few and far be- 

j tween, libraries are half deserted, and the 
great university of the state seems to have no 
integral part in the Philadelphian social 
structure. 

There is, in consequence, no social obliga- 

i.tion to be cultivated and artistic — as there is 
to be well-born, well-bred, and well-dressed. 
Philadelphian good taste can be genuine and 

I modest — a thing not always possible in more 
self-conscious centers of culture. To take but 
one example, the town possesses some of the 

, most notable private collections of paintings 

j in the country, but they are, as it were, little 
known and not much considered in Philadel- 
phia. The most remarkable — probably the 
most remarkable in America — for years ex- 
isted in confused and picturesque superabun- 
dance in every nook and corner of its owner's 
dwelling; priceless masterpieces hung about 
the shaving-stand, stood on the floor by the 
coal-hod, and, one suspected, lay hidden un- 
derneath the beds. They were incredibly ill- 



48 American Towns and People 

arranged for the visitor — but it was just this 
that somehow convinced him that they were 
not primarily intended for his pleasure, but 
for the owner's own. The fantastic, dusty 
disorder was a guarantee of the genuine love 
of beauty which had gathered these treasures, 
quite unvexed by what the town, streaming in- 
differently by, would think. Even when 
Philadelphia paintings are painstakingly and 
palatially housed, it is still true that one feels 
that the collecting must have been done for 
collecting's sake. 

Art is more unconsidered than despised in 
Philadelphia. Good taste is allowed to grow 
wild ; it is never actually rooted out. It is true 
that the local artists huddle together in rather 
frightened fashion in the artistic and literary 
clubs in the pleasant, quaint Philadelphian 
alleys, but this is more a tribute to our ingenu- 
ous American belief that art can, so to speak, 
be ''clubbed" into existence, than a real proof 
that the artists are treated as outcasts. They 
are merely judged along other lines, and their 
artistic achievements are no real handicap if 
they are well-born, well-dressed, and well- 
bred. 

There have been, perhaps oddly, a consid- 
erable number of distinguished practitioners 
of the arts who have originated in Philadel- 
phia. But they have generally practiced else- 



Who Is a Philadelphian?, 49 

where. And having thus transferred their ar- 
tistic activities to more suitable settings, Phila- 
delphia warms with a certain pride in them. 
A portrait-painter who languished at home re- 
ports that since he moved his studio to New 
York he spends all his time in Philadelphia 
executing the commissions he could not secure 
while domiciled there. 

So long as it can keep Art in its place, the 
town pays it a certain decent tribute. There 
has long been an Academy of the Fine Arts, 
and Miss Agnes Repplier delightfully records 
that when it first exhibited "imported statues" 
(plaster copies of those in the Parisian 
Louvre), one day a week was set apart for la- 
dies, and the statues were then draped! Now 
— just to prove that Philadelphia does move — 
the annual show of paintings is one of the most 
important in the country. The opening re- 
ception is of a definite social value (just to 
show that society is willing to give art a leg 
up now and then), but it would be considered 
odd to look at the paintings that evening; in- 
deed, no one but eccentric, and possibly so- 
cially doubtful strangers from other cities does 
so. 

So much for a home-keeping community 
and art! We may now ask what connection 
there is between the quiet life and public mo- 
rality. It is a puzzle to the stranger that the 



50 American Towns and People 

peaceful town has so often been politically so 
corrupt. Indeed, Philadelphia is quite as bad 
as New York at its Tammany worst; it some- 
times seems as if it took a quiet pride in being 
as dishonest as the metropolis, but without any 
fuss and feathers, any vulgar notoriety in the 
newspapers. The Philadelphian home is the 
shrine of comfort and the altar of the graces, 
but upon it there burns no fierce moral flame. 
Philadelphia did its duty during the Revolu- 
tion, but the young ladies had some very 
pleasant dancing parties with the British offi- 
cers. To the mind nourished upon terrapin 
and Madeira there is something not quite 
good style in enthusiasms, especially grim 
moral enthusiasms. William Maclay, writ- 
ing wittily early in the last century, betrays 
some of these native characteristics in what he 
means as acid criticism of New England — 
spiritually the very antipodes of his own town. 
The Bostonian, so he says, "excludes good hu- 
mor, affability of conversation, and accommo- 
dation of temper and sentiment as qualities 
too vulgar for a gentleman." The Philadel- 
phian, even when he dies for a cause, must do 
so "affably"! 

It may seem that such a picture of genial 
unmorality cannot be an authentic one of the 
so-called Quaker City. Indeed, it is perhaps 
astonishing that talk of Quakers and Quaker- 



Who Is a Philadelphian? 51 

ishness should have been put off till so late in 
the Philadelphian discussion. Quakers still 
exist; there are several prosperous "meetings" 
in the region, and there are even to be seen 
Friends who still wear the sober, rich garb of 
the sect. When charity at home or abroad is 
asked of the town, these quiet, half-forgotten 
people come unobtrusively but generously for- 
ward. To the dim shadows of the Philadel- 
phia picture they lend a soft, rich color. But 
somehow to the stranger the Quaker aspect of 
the town is too shy for capture; the Society of 
Friends seems only part of its gentle history. 
Rather, perhaps, they go to make up the larger 
Philadelphia — the great, industrious, quiet, 
thrifty town which knows little of genealogy 
or Madeira, except by hearsay; which con- 
tains the largest body of skilled artisans in the 
world, and is the ideal home of the magazines 
of largest American circulation, the happy, 
prosperous, unvexed, average American city. 
With some such thoughts you look out over 
the long stretches of the great city and see the 
smoke from ten thousand factory chimneys 
lightly stain her sky, or watch the majestic 
Delaware stream by carrying its traffic to the 
sea. You stop thinking of the Philadelphia 
of fantastic restrictions and queer codes, and 
see only the metropolis of the great common- 
wealth of Pennsylvania. Sometimes on the 



52 American Towns and People 

Philadelphian streets you see sturdy young 
women — with cheeks like scrubbed red apples 
— wearing the garb of some of the various re- 
ligious communities which still flourish in the 
state's rich farm-lands. Rich corn-fields, 
bursting barns, autumn fruit, all come into the 
imagination, and you see Philadelphia as an 
easy-going, unemotional, comfortable, well- 
fed, but still solid and dependable city. You 
begin to believe that simple happiness aver- 
ages high along the red-brick streets and in 
the far-scattered, trim suburbs. You ask your- 
self whether contentment, Philadelphia's con- 
tribution and example to the nation, is not as 
proud and worthy an achievement as any other 
of which an American town might boast. 



What Is a New-Yorker? 

THE most New-Yorkish of ladles, who 
after an excessively brief, gay winter at 
home habitually betook herself to the Rivi- 
era, to London, to Paris, and to the usual 
spring, summer, and autumn haunts of Eu- 
ropean elegance, was once asked by an in- 
telligent and curious foreigner some question 
concerning the habits and customs of her com- 
patriots. She paused, meditated prettily, and 
then made what, for the purposes of the pres- 
ent discussion of her native town, is a pro- 
foundly significant reply. 

"I'm not sure," she said, "that I'm the best 
person to ask. You see I'm a New-Yorker and 
I know so few Americans!" 

The anecdote — authentic, as all anecdotes 
should be — expresses with a nice exaggeration 
what sometimes seems to be New York's pre- 
carious position upon the edge of the North 
American continent. 

New York knows very little about America ; 

indeed, it thinks it more suitable that America 

should know something about New York; it 

53 



54 American Towns and People 

has visited the pleasure resorts of the Eastern 
slope, it has been to Washington; it has spent 
the spring in Florida, and has discovered that 
California is delightful, expensive, and not 
too "American." But the vague stretches of 
the great middle-Westernland are, so it 
imagines, peopled by dull creatures, speak- 
ing roughly and not knowing pleasure. With 
great tranquillity New York assumes that it 
is the most habitable place in the country. 
And it hears calmly that it is "foreign." 

It is the privilege of all American cities to 
sustain a large foreign population. But the 
metropolis is so accessible from Ellis Island 
that its foreigners are not only numerous, but 
have the bloom still on. They exhibit a re- 
luctance to go farther. Associations are 
formed abroad and government agents come 
here for the purpose of inducing immigrants 
to "move on." It may be because the foreign- 
ers' unwillingness to live anywhere but in New 
York seems so natural and forgivable that 
New-Yorkers welcome the visitors, and assign 
to them large parts of the town. Aliens exist 
not only in the slums, but in Fifth Avenue; in- 
deed they are so frequent in the best society 
that almost every fashionable New York lady, 
so it is said, now has a pet foreigner. 

Foreigners do not seem strange in New 
York; they belong there. On a spring after- 



What Is a New-Yorker? 55 

noon not long ago there was to be seen near 
the lovely white-marble Tower of Babel in 
Madison Square an odd-looking, long-haired, 
bareheaded, barefooted, natural-bearded man 
dressed in a single dirty white wool garment, 
an apostle of simple living, who was remem- 
bered by one observer as spreading his frowzy 
gospel five years earlier on a Swiss steamboat. 
The point is that in New York he excited less 
comment and seemed more at home than he 
had seemed at home. And so, to the New York 
eye, seem the Cubans at the hotels, the Argen- 
tines at the cabarets, the Italians in the gallery 
at the opera, the Hungarians at sidewalk cafes 
in Second Avenue, the Yiddish actors on the 
Bowery, and so on through the long romantic 
catalogue of the town. Goulash and chop 
suey and spaghetti are no stranger than pie to 
the American New-Yorker; he has made his 
culinary tour du monde within the limits of 
his own island. He might well seem, to the 
more deeply indigenous visitor from the Miss- 
issippi Valley, as foreign as the foreigner. 

Even were there no aliens in the town, salt- 
water laps on every side of it, and there is a 
fair seaway to the four corners of the globe. 
When the docks and liners with steam up lie 
little farther away than the railway stations, 
it is — or was — literally simpler for a New- 
Yorker to go abroad than to — shall we say 



56 American Towns and People 

Bar Harbor? It is quite easy to feel that the 
Battery is half-way to Europe — a famous old 
London actor, while he was playing in Broad- 
way, used to go every Saturday morning to the 
green park at the town's tip-end and watch 
the steamers go through the Narrows to Eng- 
land ; it softened his feeling of being far away. 
The noble harbor into which the Hudson 
streams is our chief gateway to the Atlantic, 
and though few New-Yorkers lounge along 
the waterside, they inhabit, for all that, a 
great port of the sea, and their natural herit- 
age is easy access to foreign lands. Whether 
or not, according to statistics, New-Yorkers 
travel more than other Americans is beside 
the point; actually and naturally more ties and 
interests and memories and hopes bind them 
to the transatlantic world. Philadelphia and 
Boston may lie upon some traditional and 
spiritual promontory nearer England, but 
New York is closer to the whole of Europe. 
Your head-waiter is just back from France, 
your bootblack's cousin has been arrested at 
Athens and your friend at the club has had 
a letter from his sister who, married to an 
Englishman, is now at Salonica. There is no 
doubt that New York faces east. It feels it- 
self at once our ambassador to Europe and 
our reception committee to the visiting for- 
eigner. 



What Is a New-Yorker? 57 

The first months of war made it exceed- 
ingly clear to the philosophical observer that 
American interests in European events varied 
directly as the distance from New York. By 
this, of course, it is not meant that everywhere 
in the land the European cataclysm did not 
stir to somber, even tragic, pity. But it was 
in New York, at least during that first year, 
that crowds stood and debated about the bulle- 
tin-boards all through the night, and that war 
hung heaviest in the overcharged and sultry 
air. The tenseness grew less even two hours 
away — a visitor to Philadelphia that winter 
found for four days in one week no war news 
on the first page of his morning paper, a thing 
inconceivable in New York. The over- 
wrought metropolis, indeed, exaggerated the 
indifference to the European event reported 
to exist elsewhere, and asserted that in the re- 
mote West Americans had not heard the guns 
in Belgium, did not even know there was a 
war. New York was then almost inclined to 
make a merit of its foreignness. Relief funds, 
administered in Wall Street, were generously 
aided from the local purse, with a unity of 
effort which the great town does not often lend 
to domestic good works; foreignness took on 
a look both interesting and gallant. 

But foreignness, especially in the antebel- 
lum years, was a term synonymous with un- 



^8 American Towns and People 

Americanism; it was an accusation brought 
against the metropolis by almost the whole 
country. The visitor to our shores is button- 
holed in the corridor of his New York hotel 
by the emissaries of the regions west of the 
Alleghanies and warned that New York is 
not American, but wholly foreign. Such dark 
hints are of course excessively confusing to 
the foreigner, who has never in his life seen 
anything less like his native land than New 
York. In his hotel his very bedroom has ter- 
rified him with its necessity for confiding his 
most intimate needs to an impersonal tele- 
phone in the wall instead of to a waiter or a 
chambermaid. Below, in the gigantic gilded 
corridors, a strange mob surges to and fro; in 
the bar lurk unknown and insidious drinks; 
and in the restaurant strange dishes like soft- 
shell crabs, the technique of eating which is 
totally a matter of conjecture and experiment. 
Outside the town suggests that it is subject 
to frequent earthquakes or bombardments. 
Elevated trains shoot above his head, at his 
feet chasms yawn and bombs explode. In the 
rare parts of the town which seem at all fin- 
ished, white towers scrape the high, pale sky, 
and marble palaces quite unlike any com- 
mercial constructions he knows line the 
crowded avenue. As for the regions dedi- 
cated to theatrical and other nocturnal pleas- 




The park affords charming vistas of the ciiy beyond. 



What Is a New-Yorker? 59 

ures, they blaze barbarically with lights and 
have the air of being quite temporarily im- 
provised. New York must present to his star- 
tled alien eye the appearance of an extrava- 
gantly rich mining-camp, where the loot of 
European luxury is being offered to hetero- 
geneous myriads, many of whom, with their 
nuggets and dust in their belts, are there avow- 
edly to ''shoot up the town." 

The presence, in protected corners, of 
French chefs and head-waiters known in Lon- 
don, or even, in one of the rougher streets of 
shacks, of the most expensive Italian opera 
in the world, will never persuade the intelli- 
gent foreigner that this is Europe. And we 
ourselves will do well to consider his point 
of view. In this sense of being a mere con- 
fused shifting camp or fair, of being perma- 
nently the least permanent place in the world, 
New York is the newest, freshest, most 
American of our cities. It is sometimes al- 
leged that modern steel construction is making 
it difficult to tear the town down every night 
and rebuild it every morning, but this is mere 
optimism. New York is experimental in its 
vague polyglot spendthrift inability to find 
out just what it really is. 

Philadelphia and Boston, besides a credit- 
able to-day, still bear the evidences of an hon- 
orable yesterday; and Chicago, to take that 



6o American Towns and People 

great city as typical of trans-Alleghany Ameri- 
canism, already shows not merely her present, 
but the concrete, clean-cut, self-conscious, de- 
liberate outlines of a future. They have, all 
of them, a more highly flavored local quality, 
a more definite personality. New York does 
its best to forget its past and to be careless 
of its future. It has amazingly little civic 
conscience. Of course the speculators in real 
estate and the politicians force the town to 
build subways and give such hostages to for- 
tune, but one sometimes feels that New York 
is willing to engage in, these constructions 
mainly because it likes the noise and gains 
from the attendant discomfort an agreeable, 
lively sense that something is happening. The 
metropolis is a lusty young giant, yelling and 
shouting, building and pulling down, and 
gayly tossing about an excess of expensive and 
lovely toys. It is difficult to say what New 
York is or will be, because it already is, and 
probably will be a little of everything. It 
is monstrously big and inconceivably vigorous. 
It is our one great city in that it is almost 
a microcosm of the world. But though it may 
contain everything foreign that there is in Eu- 
rope, Asia, and Africa, it is still, everything 
summed up, not foreign. It is not America, 
but it is very American. 

None of our great towns has anything com- 



What Is a New-Yorker? 61 

parable to New York's "floating population" 
— does the phrase not suggest agreeable ques- 
tions as to what they float upon? There are 
never enough hotels to accommodate the ar- 
rivals; cut a hole in any New York wall on 
almost any street, hang a hotel sign above it, 
and you will find that a stream of patrons 
mechanically begins to pass through it and 
''register." The openings of the great hotels 
of the metropolis are national events, and their 
characteristics are subjects for enlightened 
discussion in the remotest hamlets of the land. 
It was not so very long ago that one of them 
had neat attendants in uniform, with "Guide" 
in gold lettering upon their caps, whose whole 
duty was to conduct visitors from afar through 
the huge new pile. Troops of visitors there 
were. It may reasonably be doubted whether 
they found time during their stay in New 
York to visit the Metropolitan Museum of 
Fine Arts, but they gravely inspected what 
was to them both more interesting and more 
important. 

The luxury, confusion, the gigantic scale of 
these establishments, and the high degree of 
their organization are almost beyond descrip- 
tion. It was lately asserted that at any one of 
the newest and most extravagant the jewels 
stolen from guests' apartments mounted regu- 
larly to twenty-five hundred dollars' worth 



62 American Towns and People 

a week, and it was gravely suggested that so 
well run was one hotel in particular that the 
stealing there was probably done by the ho- 
tel's own well-drilled band of thieves, who 
could, by arrangement with chambermaids 
and watchmen, see their patrons were as 
little disturbed as possible while suffering the 
inevitable slight losses. At any rate, it is ob- 
vious that in the New York atmosphere of 
extravagance such losses are no more than flea- 
bites were in the humbler, old-fashioned hos- 
telries of our grandfathers. 

Everjrwhere through New York the float- 
ing population may be observed floating. In 
certain parts of the town and in certain moods 
it seems out of the question that there should 
be such a thing as a resident population. It 
is in fact a favorite statement that the night 
restaurants and the cabarets and the roof-gar- 
den "shows" are only visited by out-of-town 
people. It may be stated flatly that this is 
wholly untrue and a most unfair attempt to 
shift the blame. New York has in certain as- 
pects its own distinction and its own sober 
merits, but it must be admitted that among all 
our towns it excels in exuberant, unabashed, 
and vulgar pleasure-seeking. And this is not 
wholly to the credit (or discredit) of the 
floating population. The taste for "floating" 
most notably exists among the fixed inhabi- 



What Is a New-Yorker? 63 

tants. The cabarets may possibly not be habit- 
ually visited by old ladies descended from the 
Knickerbocker families, by professors of- Co- 
lumbia University, by lodgers at either the 
Martha Washington or the Mills Hotels, by 
ministers of the gospel, or by curators of the 
Natural History Museum, to pick at random 
among admirable existing types, but they are 
frequented by some millions of New-Yorkers. 
The metropolis does not adapt its tastes to 
those of its out-of-town visitors. They would 
not wish that it should. They have not come 
to the metropolis for "home cooking" in any 
conceivable or figurative meaning of that 
phrase. They are there to enjoy themselves 
New-Yorkishly, and proudly to carry the gos- 
pel and the technique of pleasure back to the 
waste places of the country. 

New York has from Revolutionary times 
accepted with equanimity the role of Siren 
City; indeed, she expects novelists and play- 
wrights to portray the dangers which lurk 
within her bosom for pure young men and 
women from the country. Boston and Phila- 
delphia are. Heaven knows, not free from evil, 
but there is something faintly ridiculous in 
the idea of their luring men to destruction. 
On the other hand, the novel or play upon 
these lines dealing with Chicago is expected 
to flatter that city as it does New York. Chi- 



64 American Towns and People 

cago is remote enough to be independent oi: 
New York, even in its vices. 

New York is notably at ease with pleas- 
ure. The habits and customs of pleasure-seek- 
ing are widely diffused, are not the property; 
of the so-called upper classes. For example, 
every one dines at restaurants in New York, 
and as night falls probably more people are 
simultaneously in evening-dress than in any 
other city in the country. There is here no 
wish to fall into the common vulgarity of at- 
taching a semi-sacred character to the "swal- 
low-tail," but its habitual employment is 
symptomatic. The easiest way to judge to 
what extent a town "dresses for dinner" is to 
notice how many men may be observed walk- 
ing in such attire or patronizing the street- 
cars, for, unquestionably, there are American 
cities where males so clad have a guilty and 
hunted look and only venture forth in "hacks." 
Therefore, the way the Fifth Avenue side- 
walks and the Madison Avenue cars blossom 
forth with top-hats and white ties on a pleas- 
ant evening is significant. More than else- 
where, too, is New York evening-dress merely 
what one wears in the evening, not a garb 
necessarily reserved for occasions and places 
of supreme elegance. Persons in such attire 
may, for example, often be seen supping, with- 
out fear or self-consciousness and for fifteen 



What Is a New-Yorker^ 65 

cents, in the famous excellent but cheap white- 
tiled Childs' restaurants. 

And the habit of carrying a cane, fantastic 
though the assertion may seem, might be made 
the basis of a philosophical differentiation of 
our various cities. A New-Yorker really 
bears a walking-stick in blithe unconsciousness 
that he is doing anything unusual. But a Bos- 
ton gentleman of the very highest rank re- 
cently seriously envied a New York friend 
who sustained himself with a cherry stick dur- 
ing business hours. And it is not so many 
years ago that a credulous new arrival in Chi- 
cago was gravely warned that an attempt to 
carry a morning cane down Dearborn Street 
might result in physical violence. 

Perhaps the chief impression which the 
metropolis makes is of the vivacity of its life. 
It is the completest expression of our national 
jote de vivre. And it is pleasant to record that 
for the most characteristic moment of this 
quality you would not cite Broadway at night, 
but Fifth Avenue by day. The sparkle of 
this famous street is perhaps largely due to 
the New York climate. Climates are never 
perfect, but among the world's great cities the 
American metropolis is singularly fortunate. 
It is flooded with sunlight, and on its best days 
the air has a crisp and tonic quality. By a 
tacit understanding, ill-dressed and sad peo- 



66 American Towns and People 

pie keep off Fifth Avenue. On a bright morn- 
ing there is no resisting the street's gay intoxi- 
cation. The most expensive shops in the 
world are close at hand, the best restaurants 
near by. Brave men lounge at the w^indows 
of exclusive clubs, and fair women cut cou- 
pons at fashionable banks. Life seems indeed 
w^orth living. The whole town is gay. Even 
children and nurse-maids in the Park seem 
more engagingly clean and innocent and spir- 
ited than elsewhere, as if they, too, felt the 
call of happiness. It is worth while noting 
the clearness of much of New York's air, 
doing justice to the clean and simple liveliness 
of much of its enjoyment, because its prom- 
inence as one of the world's chief centers of 
dissipation and pleasure-seeking has done its 
reputation bad service with many people of 
virtue and good taste. 

So much may be respectfully submitted in 
New York's defense, that if a town sets out 
to be gay there is a certain merit in being gay. 
To the deeper consideration of this proposi- 
tion every one is invited to bring whatever 
degree of toleration and philosophy life has 
taught him. It is certain, however, that just 
where New York is most obviously alluring, 
it is also most obviously hard, vulgar, tawdry, 
and repellent. There is possibly no city iji 
the world where such an exhibition could pass 



What Is a New-Yorker? 67 

without protest as enlivened the hours of 2 
A.M. during New York's second winter of the 
war. While, to the imagination, the guns 
about Verdun boomed, the young ladies of 
the chorus, who had already exhibited them- 
selves in and out of a series of satisfactorily 
indecent costumes, came forth, for the climax 
of the night's pleasure, dressed as Red Cross 
nurses, and kicked the ruffles of their under- 
wear into the faces of the half-intoxicated 
occupants of the first row of tables. It is at 
such moments that you must think hard of 
the vastness of New York, of the variety of 
its inhabitants and the multiplicity of its inter- 
ests. You must try to believe that by 2 A.M. 
some God-fearing people are already in bed 
and that others may be reading a good book. 
You must think that, besides roof-gardens, 
there are theaters crowded for Shakespearian 
revivals and concert-halls jammed with lov- 
ers of Beethoven. You must not forget that 
great institutions of learning crown the city's 
rocky heights, and that hospitals dot its lower 
levels. You must remember that there are 
not only the idle rich, but the industrious poor. 
You must again see dark processions of the 
unemployed marching somberly up the glitter 
of Fifth Avenue. You must hear ringing 
in your ears the orations of the social revolu- 
tion delivered at the feet of Lincoln in Union 



68 American Towns and People 

Square, as well as the prattle of lovely ladies 
in Louis XVI. drawing-rooms who coquet 
with new doctrines as they did in France be- 
fore the Bastille fell. You must think that 
not only do simple, rich. Western millionaires 
migrate to the metropolis, but lads from an 
older world with their worldly possessions in 
a handkerchief, to whom, down the bay, Lib- 
erty seems to offer a welcome and the hazard 
of new fortunes. You must consider while the 
lights burn so bright that it is hard to be the 
richest city in the world and always to keep 
your head on straight. 

After the town's exuberant vitality, its over- 
flowing wealth is its most striking character- 
istic. Wealth's own special enemy, Mr. Con- 
gressman Walsh, is authority for the state- 
ment that ninety-two per cent, of America's 
money is in the metropolis. Wall Street, now 
the world's financial center, collects money, 
and, besides, the continued immigration of the 
rich from all over the country brings gold to 
New York as water to a sink-hole. New 
York is the only place any one migrates to, 
with the exception of Washington. No one 
since Benjamin Franklin has ever moved to 
Philadelphia, and, with the exception of some 
few who brought a special literary baggage, 
no one has ever "settled" in Boston. Chicago 
has a few accessions from what might be 



What Is a New-Yorker? 69 

termed the Chicagoan province, but, after all, 
Chicago to so many of its indigenous inhabi- 
tants is a way-station on the road. In New 
York, on the contrary, almost the hardest thing 
to find is a born New-Yorker. You may 
come to New York with the highest social 
ambitions, or you may aspire to nothing be- 
yond calling the leading head-waiters by their 
first names, but you believe there is a place 
for you and your money on Manhattan Island. 
So, year by year, the golden stream rises 
higher. Only by the most constant and care- 
ful extravagance can New York keep it from 
bursting its banks. 

It might be thought that there were tradi- 
tions and historical examples enough of how 
to sp^d. But when you consider the world's 
long history you find that money, in the lavish 
abundance we now know, existed in imperial 
Rome and wept out with it. It was re-in- 
vented in Perif, and, even if you come straight 
down to the nineteenth century, they were rich 
in Havana before they were in New York. 
The present fabulous riches have come within 
the memory of the present generation, and 
the problem of spending is actually a fresh 
one, which New York is gallantly trying to 
solve. 

It was long ago discovered that merely to 
build a large, costly house upon an expensive 



JO American Towns and People 

site was too simple to be the way out of the 
difficulty — how often in our smaller Ameri- 
can towns have we seen the innocent local mil- 
lionaire construct an expensive stone "home" 
and then live in it with two Swedish girls 
as "help." Many of the richest people in New 
York live in quite small houses; there are 
other ways — such as changing the drawing- 
room flowers three times daily, or having a 
decent valet for your chauffeurs — of making 
the money fly. It is just the growth of luxu- 
rious detail in New York wliich makes the in- 
vestigation of the great city so profitable to 
students from the provinces. The lady, for 
example, who gives a quiet little party of six 
to dine and go to the play and has bought 
boxes at three different theaters, so that her 
guests may choose whichever suits their post- 
prandial mood, strikes the New York note 
with beautiful clearness. And the gentleman 
who, in a fit of half-amused exasperation that 
his favorite motor-car was being used one 
morning to convey his wife's canary to the 
bird-doctor, sent home that afternoon a smaller 
car for the exclusive use of the feathered mem- 
bers of his household, is either a New-Yorker 
or soon will be. There is, too, the imperial 
gesture, as when lately for a debutantes' ball 
special trains were sent to convey male youth 
and beauty from the three great colleges. 



What Is a New-Yorker? ji 

And, as intelligence has grown the vogue of 
recent years even in New York, some people 
find it pleasant to keep a pet weekly paper or 
a tame theater or an opera. 

The habit of extravagance pervades the 
whole New York community. The shop-girl 
may have but one dress, but it is in the latest 
style. No one is ever more than two weeks 
behind the fashion in New York. People do 
not regulate their expenditures according to 
their incomes; they regulate their incomes ac- 
cording to their expenditures, or try to. An 
extra cylinder in the motor means an extra 
hour in Wall Street, that is all. Life is so 
full, so free, that it seems almost ill-natured 
to be poor in New York. 

The moment has probably come in what 
is hoped is already a glittering picture of the 
metropolis to speak of "society," noting first, 
however, that nowhere but in a large city like 
New York is the life of those not "in society" 
so full of possibilities of rational or irrational 
enjoyment. It is beside the point to inquire 
whether fashionable New York would like to 
conduct its activities in anything like decent 
privacy — it has no such chance. It is the vic- 
tim of our national passion for newspapers. 
It is, of course, permissible to suspect that the 
town is so large that even the most highly 
placed can secure moments of incognito^ and 



72 American Towns and People 

that a metropolitan gossip can never know all 
her neighbors' news. But if you were to judge 
merely from the press, there is no one in West 
Podunk or Bird Center who cannot accurately 
follow the daily and nightly movements of 
New York's crowned heads. In the metropo- 
lis itself plebeian intimacy with royalty goes 
even further. Two occupants of orchestra 
seats at the opera, possibly leading "buyers" 
for a high-class department-store, were lately 
overheard commenting upon the ornaments 
of the boxes. They viewed with especial 
pleasure a famous lady in white satin, the 
more exposed portions of whom were covered 
with the loveliest pearls. 

"Yes, Mrs. X. is looking wonderful to-night. 
And I think it's so nice that every one here 
knows she is such a good mother!" 

Is this not an agreeable side of democracy? 

The legend has grown up and is believed, 
even in New York, that there is an extra poig- 
nant flavor to the fashionableness of New 
York's fashion, a more glittering pinnacle 
there upon which the favored few lightly 
balance. New York envies no other fashion- 
ableness, and though this is offensive to other 
cities, it gives a delightful serenity to New 
York life itself. 

Romantic writers for the Sunday supple- 
ments talk of New York's old families, and 



What Is a New-Yorker? 73 

indeed it is said that obscure people still exist 
who were in society before the 'seventies of 
the last century. But you might hear more 
talk in Chicago of old families than in New 
York, and with reason, for it is quite possible 
that the reigning powers of the Western me- 
tropolis have been the longer established. 
People in New York may have maiden aunts 
living in the Stuyvesant Square region, but 
they visit them privately; the stranger may 
perhaps see these nice old ladies in caps at 
sunny windows where canary-birds hang, but 
he will find no one lunching at the Ritz who 
can introduce him to them. Indeed, the legen- 
dary Dutch connection is chiefly useful in ex- 
cusing the stolidity of well-born young men. 
New York is socially as fresh as paint and as 
bright as several new dollars. 

The newspaper readers have all been told 
that the one requisite for being very much *4n 
society" in New York is to be very rich. And 
the view finds support, it is said, inside the 
charmed circle itself. At an evening party 
with song-birds from the Metropolitan one of 
the proudest queens left in the middle of the 
program. A rival, whose dislike of music 
was equally genuine, rose to follow her, but 
was detained by the gentleman by her side, 
himself a wit and a noted arbiter of the ele- 
gancies. 



74 American Towns and People 

"No, my dear lady," he said, "you aren't 
rich enough to leave early. Mrs. A. has ten 
times your money — it's all right for her, but 
you must be polite and stay till the end!" 

We may assume, without further discussion, 
that wealth receives its due consideration in 
New York's highest circles. And yet, very 
rich people not in society are much commoner 
and much more characteristic in the metropo- 
lis than rich people in it. The gentlemen with 
megaphones on the Seeing-New-York wagons 
may know who inhabit all the Fifth Avenue 
palaces; nobody else knows. The fabled 
street of fashion is now largely peopled by the 
unknown rich. The hotels and apartment- 
houses are infested with them. Some of them 
belong in New York, others have migrated 
there — moths tempted by the great metropoli- 
tan adventure. But, somehow, for all the ac- 
tivity of their movements, they carry with 
them a hint of loneliness. It is a sheer physi- 
cal impossibility for any social structure to ac- 
commodate them all. They are condemned to 
minor circles, to eternal shopping, to theater- 
going, and to overeating in the restaurants. 

Indeed, a situation quite unexampled in 
all history has arisen in New York. There is 
so much money that there is danger of its 
coming to be almost a drug on the market. 
Rich people do not always even attain to the 




Vast aqueducts cf traffic span the sky. 



What Is a New-Yorker? 75 

honor of being excluded ; they are more often 
not even known. Is it possible that our great 
national malady, wealth, carries somewhere 
within it its own antidote? Even now there 
are optimistic New-Yorkers who, while they 
admit that there must always be in society 
plenty of people whose money will grease the 
wheels, allege that already achievement, 
beauty, intelligence, charm, and wit are in 
active demand. 

If not in demand in "society," it is fairly 
certain that they are wanted somewhere in 
the vast city. New York probably ofifers op- 
portunity to a greater variety of individual 
social tastes than any American town. It is a 
metropolis, if not a capital. But, unhappily, 
in the latter phrase there lies a sting. If 
Washington could only be rolled into the 
larger town there would exist a New York 
which could definitely challenge comparison 
with London or Paris. But so long as the na- 
tion's affairs are transacted in the District of 
Columbia, New York has uneasy moments 
of haunting doubt as to whether it is not, after 
all, a mere settlement of Wall Street brokers 
and young actresses. The winter excursion to 
Washington has become an almost necessary 
adjunct to the New York winter. And the so- 
cial opportunities of the capital are spoken 
of in almost hushed tones by those who would 



76 American Towns and People 

dismiss Philadelphia and Boston with a laugh. 
It is a confession by the confused and shape- 
less metropolis of social incompleteness. 

Now self-consciously to remedy social in- 
completeness is a trait racy of our American 
soil. The process, always going on, is what 
gives perpetually the tingling, exciting sense 
that we are a new country. New York, to take 
but one example, is big and rich and varied 
enough to offer some sort of natural and secure 
and tranquil perch for Art. But the town is 
so persuaded that Art is an essential part of 
a creditable metropolitan existence that Art is 
always being chivvied to and fro by organiza- 
tions determined to uplift it and individuals 
sworn to be Bohemian at any cost. Already in 
many respectable circles every one has once 
met a painter, knows a writer, or calls an actor 
by his Christian name. 

And this is but one more stroke in the de- 
sired picture of confusion and flux and change 
which is the portrait of New York. The town 
is a mere experimental laboratory. In Bos- 
ton and Philadelphia you can know who's who 
and what's what. And after a certain ac- 
quaintance with those cities you can fairly pre- 
cisely estimate their resources. New York is 
a grab-bag in a booth at the World's Fair, 
but there is nothing you may not hope to pull 
from its depths. Its human structure, to 



What Is a New-Yorker? JJ 

change the metaphor, is as impermanent as 
its physical. It would be a joke to talk of a 
settled and well-regulated society in such a 
place. An exclusive dancing-class or an as- 
sembly ball would be grotesque. Everything 
and everybody are in the melting-pot in New 
York. And though New York is still far from 
the social liquid condition which obtains in 
great towns abroad, there are reasons to hope 
that some day, when the mixing process has 
gone further and it is more nearly possible 
for any New Yorker to know all New York, 
the metropolis will be one of the most interest- 
ing, stimulating, and pleasant places in the 
world to inhabit. 

It is already, from the American point of 
view, the most exciting and preoccupying. 
There is no one who does not go to New 
York, no one whom fate might not send there 
to live. Of course, no writer can be so de- 
luded as to think that he only can strip the 
veil from the metropolis — seven times seven 
veils are daily torn from it in every magazine 
and newspaper in the country. Nothing new 
can be said about it. And all can never be 
said. The best that is to be hoped Is that what- 
ever may be thought or recorded about the 
American metropolis will derive some interest 
from the subject — for New York, for better 
or for worse, is our great national interest. 



The Portrait of Chicago 

THE final insult to a Chicagoan is to recog- 
nize his town after any absence from it. 
A certain writer, planning to do a certain 
article on Chicago, was remonstrated with by 
a lady from that metropolis. 

"I don't see," she remarked, "how you can 
expect to give an accurate picture of the town, 
and to do it justice; you haven't been there 
since January." 

This conversation, taking place in April, 
gives some measure of the rapidity with which, 
in the opinion of its inhabitants, Chicago 
changes. For them, who know so well that 
each moment of Chicago history has always 
brought improvement, and always will, it is 
small wonder that the golden moment for 
writing definitely of their town never quite 
arrives, and that the real Chicago is always 
a little in the future. 

Indeed, there is almost nothing in the way 
of change which the Chicagoan may not, with 
some show of reason, hope for. There is one 
supreme symbol of the town's accomplish- 
ment; now that the Chicago River, so long a 

79 



8o American Towns and People 

foul and unspeakable stream, has been mirac- 
ulously reversed in its course, and flows inland 
toward the Mississippi in a clear blue flood 
from Lake Michigan's heart, it must be ad- 
mitted instantly that a city which has wrought 
this hydraulic wonder is capable of effecting 
any transformation which its imagination can 
conceive. 

Here, at the outset of the Chicagoan discus- 
sion, is what one might call the theme which 
runs through all its Western music. Chicago 
is what all American towns theoretically 
should be — self-made. It did not just grow, 
like Topsy and New York and Philadelphia 
and Boston, but it is the product of constant 
and bitter effort. Looking at a map to-day and 
observing the magnificent convergence of all 
the railways and all the steamship lines of the 
great Middle-Western country upon the south- 
ern shore of Lake Michigan, it is easy to be- 
lieve that Chicago's destiny was always mani- 
fest. But it cannot have been so evident to 
those early settlers. The town was built in a 
morass bordering a sluggish, sullen stream, 
swept alternately by bitter winter gales and 
scorching dust-laden summer blasts from a 
hot prairie. For months a blanket of driz- 
zling clouds obscured the sun. Chicago has 
been described by one of its favorite sons as 
"having no climate of its own, but being 



The Portrait of Chicago 8l 

exposed to the incursions of all the cli- 
mates there are." Of course in these incur- 
sions must be included rare days of perfect 
weather, when the beauty of the town's loca- 
tion by its great blue lake is very moving. 
But the rule still holds that, though Chicago 
has a great deal of climate, most of it is bad. 

The river has been turned back, and 
(though the sky-scrapers must be built on 
piles driven in the water-logged earth) the 
mud in the down-town streets is a thing of the 
past; but Chicago has as yet discovered noth- 
ing which can alter the essential quality of the 
climate of three-quarters of its year. Exist- 
ence there seems predestined to be a struggle 
against nature and the powers of darkness. 
The town's whole history has a grotesque, 
passionate epic quality. The old Chicago was 
a smoking furnace, a seething caldron. From 
the windows of a train creeping into it in the 
murk and mists of the early morning the vast, 
straggling suburbs, the belching chimneys on 
remote, isolated islands in a grimy prairie sea 
had something sinister and portentous in them. 
Any sweetness and light in Chicago must have 
been paid for, you feel, with tears and blood. 
But the town's gallant inhabitants have al- 
ways been ready to pay that price, and more, 
for progress. In the spacious elegance of 
Michigan Boulevard, where on one hand a 



82 ^American Towns and People 

symphony orchestra plays and operatic sing- 
ers carol, and on the other untold thousands 
of students, male and female, ply all the love- 
' liest arts in marble halls, you feel invigorated 
and cheered by Chicago's success in being a 
fully equipped center of civilization, whatever 
the odds against it may have been. Here is, 
indeed, the authentic and traditional Ameri- 
canism which since the Civil War has some- 
what faded from sight along the Atlantic sea- 
board, where great and rich cities are only 
too apt to let not only luxury and the arts, but 
civic pride and responsibility, too, come as 
they will. Here is the reason for the state- 
ments so often flung by Chicago in the face 
of its Eastern rivals, that it alone is the great 
American city. It has its foreign population 
in heterogeneous hordes, and its quarters of 
the town where alien languages prevail, but to 
some extent it has kept the early American 
digestion of immigrants ; it assimilates a tough, 
trans-oceanic diet and makes of its inhabitants, 
if not Americans, at least Chicagoans. 

Civic pride is the real Chicago passion — 
pride in whatever achievement has been made, 
and pride in the sacrifices entailed by what- 
ever achievement remains to be made. Never, 
it may be presumed, in the history of the world 
have its inhabitants done so much for a town 
in so short a time. The whole structure of 



The Portrait of Chicago 83 

civic, artistic, and charitable institutions has 
been created by a few generations, who had 
faith in their chosen home and a gesture at 
once broad and imaginative. 

Almost the first of American cities, Chi- 
cago erected huge buildings, planned great 
boulevards, and laid out a spacious park sys- 
tem. It suddenly built a university, from 
the beginning almost the largest in the world, 
covering a great waste tract with academic 
halls and cloisters. It put huge bathing estab- 
lishments in its parks by its blue lake, so that 
during happy summer days the poorest Chi- 
cagoan might find his city the ideal vacation 
resort. It set fountains, pools, and sunken 
gardens around great factories and mail-order 
houses, so that some refreshing breath of art 
might come to the humblest worker. The 
catalogue of its achievements is tremendous. 
Indeed, there is an optimism in its lake breezes 
which makes even the most reluctant Easterner 
believe that if everything in Chicago is not 
perfection it is only because there has not yet 
been time to make it so. The things which 
Chicago has had time to finish often have a 
style and a distinction which are not to be 
found in such muddle-headed, floundering 
places as, for instance. New York. The New- 
Yorker is indeed the most striking and un- 
happy contrast possible to the Chicagoan — 



84 American Towns and People 

he is fatuously proud of his town and yet will 
not turn his hand over for it. The true Chi- 
cagoan will sell his soul for Chicago, and 
sometimes has to. Upon the shoulders of 
each typical Chicagoan Chicago lies like a 
burden. If you are not willing to accept this 
responsibility you move away from Chicago. 
And it has been maliciously suggested that the 
joie de vivre SO conspicuous in the expatriates 
from that city scattered over the whole world 
may be slightly analogous to that of the galley- 
slave released. For the loyalty and service de- 
manded of residents are deep and searching. 
The march of improvement must be partici- 
pated in by one and all, and there is no light- 
est aspect of life too trivial to have importance. 
One poor-spirited fellow who has moved to 
New York explains, almost paradoxically, 
what for him are the possibilities of pleasure 
in the Eastern metropolis. 

''If," he says, "I want to spend a quiet even- 
ing at home, perhaps with a good book, I know 
that the tables in the restaurants are all en- 
gaged, that the theaters will be crowded, the 
Broadway sidewalks thronged, and that in 
a thousand supper-places youth and pleasure 
will chase the glowing hours till dawn. 
Everything is going at top speed, and in any 
case no one would think it my fault if it 
weren't. In New York I can stay at home in 




The Windy City on a windy day. 



The Portrait of Chicago 85 

peace. In Chicago I should have an uneasy 
sense that somehow, somewhere, I ought to 
be actively completing that evening's triumph- 
ant Chicago picture." 

There is always a hint of treachery in this 
moving away. A really high-minded Chica- 
goan transfers his residence only after fasting 
and prayer and taking counsel of his most 
earnest friends. Ideally he should be con- 
vinced, first, that he will return; and, second, 
that from the more effete Washington, Eu- 
rope, or New York he can bring back loot to 
adorn Chicago, as a Roman might have 
fetched home the spoils of Antioch and Athens 
to enrich the seven hills. Neither at home nor 
abroad can the Chicagoan escape the convic- 
tion of what he is. 

Chicago is, in a sense which should now be 
comprehensible, the most self-conscious great 
city of the world. The word is used accu- 
rately; self-consciousness does not necessarily 
include either over-sensitiveness or conceit. 
The great Western town knows, better than 
any outsiders can, its merits and its faults. 

For a long time Chicago existed in a kind 
of wilderness. Before the World's Fair of 
some quarter of a century ago it was a kind 
of terra incognita. Even now visitors, espe- 
cially those from abroad, are guilty of an in- 
credible vagueness about even the town's geog- 



86 American Towns and People 

raphy. There is a story about some strangers 
entertained at a well-known club who asked 
where the lake was of which they heard peo- 
ple speak, and when, from the very windows 
of the room where they sat its blue expanse 
was pointed out, expressed surprise, since they 
had supposed that was the Pacific Ocean! It 
is not long ago that an intelligent Philadelphia 
lady spoke of a friend who was "going out" 
to Chicago to live, much as an early-nine- 
teenth-century Londoner might have spoken 
of any one who was settling in New Guinea. 
For a long time the East thought of Chicago 
with ignorant, wondering amazement, recog- 
nized it economically, but not socially. 

This was the period of legends which told 
of the big feet of Chicago girls and of the 
universality of divorce there. It was the time 
— not altogether past — of English novels 
which introduced Silas P. Guigg, a pork- 
packer, and his vulgar and pushing family. 
The facts are that the Chicagoans of that day 
were, many of them, really engaged in build- 
ing houses designed by Richardson, entertain- 
ing Matthew Arnold, and collecting libraries 
of first editions, and that then, as now, few, 
if any of them, had ever seen the stock-yards. 
But it availed them nothing in the outer 
world. , There is an apocryphal story of Eu- 
gene Field meeting in London a distinguished 



The Portrait of Chicago 87 

female novelist who was wide-eyed with won- 
dering amazement at learning of his usual 
habitat, and inquired gravely into his origins. 

"Well, madam," he is said to have answered, 
"when I was caught I was living in a tree!" 

The inhabitants of the regions east of the 
Alleghanies can scarcely have at any period 
imagined that Chicagoans were actually 
swinging by their tails in jungles bordering 
Lake Michigan, but they did view people 
from those shores with great distrust. I^adies 
of that town, escaping to the fuller, richer 
life of London or New York, sometimes de- 
nied their origin, and even transformed them- 
selves into Virginians, always a popular 
though partly unconvincing method of claim- 
ing aristocracy of birth in America. 

It would be the grossest exaggeration to de- 
scribe these early Chicagoans as outcasts in 
the land, yet there is just enough of truth in 
the statement to make it understandable how 
the town was knit together and how civic 
enthusiasm and pride were the answer to the 
challenge of an efifete and doubting world. 
It must always be remembered that even in 
this Mid-Western country Chicago is new — 
when it was a mere frontier post both Cincin- 
nati and St. Louis had old-established fami- 
lies and hereditary wealth. 

Of course Chicago did not even begin quite 



88 American Towns and People 

in the style of the stone age. Many of those 
early settlers packed in their baggage the best 
traditions and the finest culture of the East — 
the last survivor of the Boston Tea Party died 
in Chicago in '52. But in the building of the 
new metropolis the more elegant immigrants 
v^orked shoulder to shoulder with many 
rougher-hewn pioneers. And there is a queer, 
almost pathetic, kind of comedy in the memo- 
ries of the attempts of the one sort gently and 
fraternally to civilize the other. A book giv- 
ing the history of the most aristocratic of Chi- 
cago's clubs records gravely and sweetly how 
many of the first members had to be taught 
what a club was and how a gentleman used 
one. And it is true that the reactions of the 
raw kind of Chicagoan to the more finished 
civilizations of the world were often notable. 
There is a singularly pleasant story of two 
young gentlemen — of the second generation — 
who were bicycling in Italy. One day they 
passed through a fairly large town. They 
were for the moment engrossed in baseball 
talk; still at the gate at the farther end of 
the city one of them paused. 

"Don't you think," he said, "we ought to 
find out what place this is?" 

They asked and discovered that it was Flor- 
ence. Contented with the information, they 
rode on and resumed their talk! 



The Portrait of Chicago 89 

So much for the immunity from impression. 
Of course more sensitive souls there were, too. 
The famous lady, for example, who, after a 
single trip abroad, opened the gates of her 
country place on a Wisconsin lake so that of 
a Saturday night "the peasants ( !) might come 
in and from the lawn listen to the music in the 
drawing-room." 

All this is broad comedy, and nothing to be 
especially ashamed of. There is sometimes 
now to be discovered in the new Middle West 
an almost snobbish tendency to forget the past 
and to pretend that there never was a time 
when lettuce salad was dressed with vinegar 
and sugar. A Middle-Westerner not yet de- 
crepit seizes this opportunity to confess that 
he can perfectly remember the year when 
olive-oil crossed the Alleghanies, and that he 
believes the earlier sour-sweet dish had a racy 
flavor of the very ante-bellum Americanism 
which reclaimed all that northwestern wilder- 
ness. 

Chicago is, in Bacon's phrase, "young in 
years, old in hours." It is almost literally a 
creation of yesterday. A little group of Chi- 
cagoan residents of New York dining together 
termed themselves jocosely "survivors of the 
Fort Dearborn massacre," and really might 
almost have been. The incredible speed with 
which things have had to be accomplished 



90 American Towns and People 

sometimes makes in only two generations of a 
Chicago family the traditional complete his- 
tory from the rude pioneer American ancestor 
to the over-cultivated Europeanized descend- 
ant. It is just the violence of such transitions 
w^hich accounts for much of the town's special 
flavor, for that note of vigor, of competence, 
of achievement, which made a Washington- 
ian once assert that in the wilds of Africa she 
would be able to tell a Chicago woman by the 
mere firm hand-clasp. 

The years count for so much by Lake 
Michigan that the most preposterous effect of 
age can be produced almost while you wait. 
The old residential streets from which fashion 
has ebbed have already a quaintness which 
will soon be comparable to that of Beacon 
Hill, and in the regions where the early Chi- 
cagoans built their summer cottages (before 
the North Shore of Massachusetts was thought 
of) there are delicious examples of nineteenth- 
century domestic architecture which will be 
invaluable when the history of art in that pe- 
riod comes to be written. 

As for old families, nowhere in America is 
laudator temporis acti as loud in regrets as in 
our youngest great city at the passing of an 
earlier aristocracy and the social swamping of 
the town by new people. And though this 
sounds absurd, it is not in the least absurd; the 



The Portrait of Chicago 91 

odd compression of Chicago makes the settlers 
of the '6o's seem as if they might have come in 
the '6o's of the eighteenth century. 

The contrasts resulting from the town's 
fabulously quick growth are often startling 
and picturesque. The uncertainty of actual 
personal safety was formerly, for the alien ob- 
server, one of the most pleasing features of 
the picture. Only a decade or so ago bandits 
used to seize especially promising home-goers 
at six in the evening in the crowded and well- 
lit North Clark Street and, dragging their vic- 
tims through the dark and lonely side streets 
to the Lake Shore Drive, there rob at their 
leisure. And the mining-camp aspect of the 
great city was luridly obvious near the sin- 
ister Rush Street Bridge, where all through 
the night ladies wearing upon their lovely per- 
sons the traditional king's ransom in jewels 
sped in luxurious carriages over a thorough- 
fare upon which no solitary nocturnal pedes- 
trian dared venture. But sandbagging and 
footpads' work have declined with the years, 
so Chicagoans to-day assure the simple and 
trusting stranger. 

There is some desolate made land by the 
lake, for a long time unbuilt upon, the abode 
of a squatter who claimed title to it and de- 
fied all the ordinary processes of law and vio- 
lence to evict him. Near by his hut is the 



92 American Towns and People 

"Casino," briefly to be described as a sort of 
country club in town, which is of an advanced 
elegance and style and beauty which make 
it quite the "smartest" thing in America. And 
it is quite possible that sometimes the air out- 
side might be pierced by the memories of un- 
availing cries of the rude and untutored sand- 
baggers' prey while in the Casino's polished 
lovely rooms dozens of able-bodied Chicago 
young men are whipped in by public-spirited 
women to drink tea in a fashion that makes 
their town honorably compare with Paris or 
London in idle, ante-bellum days. 

Tea-drinking is indeed trivial, but nothing 
is too trivial for attention if it can perfect 
Chicago. In the old days when Anglomania 
was fashionable in America a Chicago hos- 
tess — a Presbyterian, too — was deeply dis- 
tressed if men did not accept the whisky and 
soda, and ladies the cigarettes, which ad- 
vices from London assured her were offered at 
tea-time in that capital. And a rumor that 
young noblemen staying in English country 
houses required a refreshing glass of kilmmel 
frappe sent to their rooms before breakfast 
would have been seriously investigated from 
this lady's establishment in Lake Forest. 

All this is not particularly from any slavish 
wish to copy the modes of other towns. It 
is more in the nature of a guarantee of good 



The Portrait of Chicago 93 

faith, an evidence that even if it is painful 
to be fashionable, if it be for the good of Chi- 
cago devoted creatures stand ready to be fash- 
ionable. Or fashionable and artistic com- 
bined! The early days of opera, in every 
American city which has attempted it, have 
always been marked by the martyrdom of the 
American music-hating male. New York 
went through such a period, emerging at last 
with an institution incredibly popular but no 
longer violently fashionable. And Chicago 
has seen the light. It gave itself lately one 
winter's respite — a winter marked, so local ob- 
servers asserted, by unusual social high spirits. 
But it has again taken up its operatic cross and, 
to its astonishment, finds it very light. In the 
fertile Chicago soil musical taste grows 
quickly. 

The early days of the Chicago Orchestra 
were marked by the same support given by all 
the social machinery to a civic and artistic en- 
terprise. There was even a brave pretense 
that it was a gay, smart thing to dine Saturday 
night and to go on to a Brahms symphony. 
Now the Orchestra is genuinely liked, and 
larkish society people are free to dine at eight 
and arrive at a musical comedy at half-past 
nine if they like, just as they do in New York. 

There is no telling what such a deeply 
American community as Chicago will accom- 



94 American Towns and People 

plish, once it puts its mind to it. Upon the 
stage the speech of Chicagoans is made to rasp 
like a buzz-saw. But an Englishman visiting 
this country some years ago reported on his 
return that the American accent softest and 
pleasantest to his ear he had heard in Chicago. 
If he was right it is because the natural Mid- 
Western accent would have been the least 
pleasant and that Chicago had in consequence 
gone to the greatest pains to correct it. 

Chicago, indeed, gives the lie to almost all 
the traditions concerning it. It is, for ex- 
ample — if one could trust people who have 
never been there — the most material of our 
towns. But, oddly enough, it is really not with 
material development that the student of Chi- 
cago should concern himself, for — paradoxi- 
cal though it may sound — Chicago competes 
with Boston for the position of the least ma- 
terial of our cities. 

First of all, Chicago is not, as things go in 
America, a rich town. It is not poor, but it 
lacks the huge money accumulations of New 
York, and the average prominent citizen is 
not hopelessly struggling to discover some way 
of spending his income. The great fortunes 
of Chicago are, on the whole, of mercantile 
and manufacturing origin rather than of the 
haute finance, and the resultant tone is one 
of sobriety, almost frugality. Chicago wealth 



The Portrait of Chicago 95 

is — contrary to all accepted tradition — not os- 
tentatious. In the earlier, more tumultuous 
days when the city was the farthest point east 
touched by a wild and woolly West and 
Southwest, they set silver dollars in the tessel- 
lated pavement of the Palmer House barber- 
shop, and the legend went forth of an unbri- 
dled vulgarity. Meanwhile in fact the whole 
structure of public foundations and charities 
was being built up with amazing swiftness by 
the prompt generosity and public spirit of 
two — at the most, three — generations. The 
open purse for civic needs genuinely acted to 
maintain a certain modesty in the standards 
of private living which still persists. Money 
is not despised there, but if you must be poor, 
Chicago is not a bad place to try it in. 

It is not a bad place to try to be democratic 
in. Society there is, of course, elegant and 
fashionable, and to all intents and purposes 
exactly like any other American society in its 
habits and customs. And yet, on the whole, 
one might venture to say that it leans rather 
on the side of unpretentiousness and well-bred 
accessibility. It might be taken in evidence 
that a daily newspaper recently put up plac- 
ards in all the street-cars with this urgent ap- 
peal to even the humble strap-hanger, "Watch 
for your name in our new department of so- 
ciety news"! 



96 American Towns and People 

Chicago, perhaps just because it knows that 
the world is likely to accuse it of the contrary, 
is, if anything, almost unduly anxious to be 
modest, quiet, and well-bred. In the summer 
it avoids Newport and places too tainted with 
the famous vulgarity of New York, and on 
the shores of New Engand claims a natural 
affinity with Boston's quieter civilization and 
frugal culture. Indeed it is no little mock 
New York, but rather, if one may risk the 
comparison, a great, unshackled, rough and 
lively Boston of the West, with all the vitality 
and the sharp indigenous quality which were 
once the especial possession of the New Eng- 
land capital. Strange religions and new phi- 
losophies now spring from the prairie more 
lustily than ever from Beacon Hill. Even 
poesy has gone westward, and all Illinois is 
now a nest of singing-birds. 

Nowhere can the persistent efficiency of 
the Western metropolis be more plainly seen 
and more agreeably studied than in this mat- 
ter of art. It was somewhere along in the 
'8o's of the last century that the now classic 
prophecy was uttered that, ''when she got 
ready, Chicago would make culture hum." 
Culture is now being made to hum there as 
nowhere else in the world. The gathering of 
students at the Art Institute is something ma- 
jestic and unparalleled; never in the world 



The Portrait of Chicago 97 

have so many eager pilgrims simultaneously 
approached the shrines of painting and sculp- 
ture. If numbers are to count, Chicago is 
already the art center of the world. It is too 
early to judge by results whether this great 
Mid-Western country — of which Chicago is 
consciously and proudly the capital — is as 
fertile a soil for art as it is for corn. Time 
will tell; genius shows itself where God wills, 
whether it be in Iowa or in France. Mean- 
while an intensive culture of these prairie 
fields is being practiced. Not only are the 
students lusty and eager, as befits their origin, 
but the outside public of mere appreciators 
strains, as it were, at the leash. It is possible 
in Chicago, and in Chicago only, for a gay, 
fashionable party of young people, after 
lunching at a smart restaurant, to adjourn to 
the Institute, where the thoughtful host has 
engaged a lecturer to give them a little talk 
on the pictures there displayed! 

There is, indeed, in Chicago an efficiency in 
dealing with art so hard and bright as almost 
to terrify easier-going people from slacker 
communities. Art clubs, art associations, art- 
display rooms, art theaters, art tea-rooms, and 
so forth are wisely concentrated in certain ad- 
mirable buildings where all the advantages of 
elevators, central heating, and general tele- 
phonic service are to be secured. The Chi- 



98 American Towns and People 

cago Little Theater was a peculiarly striking 
example of the Chicago way of dealing with 
budding art. In New York such a tentative 
enterprise would probably be housed in a 
transformed studio or a disused and forgotten 
playhouse or a rebuilt old mansion in the 
slums. In Chicago it existed on the twelfth 
or twentieth floor of a clean, sanitary, and ex- 
pensive building, where art seemed to shed any 
bedraggled bohemian quality it may have in 
older civilizations. Here in a thoroughly dis- 
infected air you might, for example, see a play 
of medieval monkish life written by a young 
girl from Michigan and played by Wisconsin 
artists. Again culture must tremble like a 
hunted fox in the thickets, for quite probably 
both play and players will be excellent. 

Art is indeed domesticated among Chica- 
goans — they are scarcely afraid of it at all. It 
has seemed quite natural that in one of the 
drinking-rooms of the University Club there 
should be decorative and satirical frescoes by 
members of the club, who are valued because 
they are artists, not merely tolerated as they 
might be in more effete but supposedly more 
artistic regions. 

Chicago's attitude to the drama is interest- 
ing, significant, and full of promise. And 
here reference is not primarily to the en- 
dowed or the avowedly "artistic" theater, but 



The Portrait of Chicago 99 

to the commercial institution, which of neces- 
sity is still freighted with the greater cargo 
of dramatic hopes. Chicago is the only great 
town outside New York which can reasonably 
claim independence of the judgments of the 
Eastern metropolis. Success in New York is 
no guarantee of success in Chicago, and fail- 
ure on Broadway may even be a recommenda- 
tion near Michigan Boulevard. Chicago is 
our second — with the possible exception of the 
Pacific coast cities — our only other "produc- 
ing center"; plays first shown there may win 
a profitable local patronage and travel to ad- 
vantage on the Chicago reputation through 
a wide district of rich tributary province. 
The advantage to the American theater of 
having a second string to its bow is incalcula- 
ble. Indeed, no one can really think it other 
than advantageous for American civilization 
that Chicago should think itself and be a real 
capital, an independent metropolis. 

There are, even from the Chicagoan point 
of view, blemishes on the reverse of the medal 
of victory; the gallant struggle for independ- 
ence and perfection is not yet over. The 
prizes which the East can offer to talent and 
ambition are often richer than those within 
Chicago's power, and there is a constant small 
drain of its resources in the migration of men 
and women to the Eastern seaboard. But this 



100 American Towns and People 

is in the end more than balanced by the con- 
stant immigration, from the East and from 
the prairie country, of the young and ambi- 
tious. Chicago is for them still a land of op- 
portunity, democratic enough to have chances 
still open for all, American enough to have 
faith that all the chances are winning ones. 
Even those who desert have gained something 
from contact with the boundless vigor of the 
giant city. Every American ought to live — 
at least for a little while — in Chicago. 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 

ANY one trying to catch and write down 
the individual quality of towns and 
cities is forever being delighted and surprised 
at the way in which the look of buildings, 
streets, and gardens betrays the character of 
places and their inhabitants. If some lonely 
stranger were to visit the capital of these 
United States and leave it, having talked with 
no one, he would, for all that, carry away 
shining memories of almost all that was 
needed for the understanding of Washington. 
He would first of all remember that upon a 
hill at one end of the town the Capitol, the 
most beautiful building in America, lies like 
a fair white cloud. At the other end of a 
great avenue, he would have gone by the 
President's House sitting upon a green lawn. 
From a small, smooth knoll among leafy 
groves near the broad river he would have 
seen a gleaming white shaft incredibly pierce 
the blue of a soft. Southern sky. And he 
would know that the business of governing 
the country is the only one going on in Wash- 

101 



I02 American Towns and People 

ington; and that politics is, always has been, 
and always will be the town's one great pre- 
occupation. 

As Petrograd rose as If by magic from the 
marshes of the Neva, so did Washington, 
something over a century ago, from the lovely 
wooded hills along the Potomac. The capital 
grew more slowly. The stories are well known 
of Mrs. Adams's domestic difficulties at the 
White House. Outside the President's Pal- 
ace, things were worse in a city which a 
visiting Frenchman wittily described as con- 
sisting of streets without houses and houses 
without streets. The early memoirs are 
largely concerned with carriages, freighted 
with elegant females, stuck in the main ave- 
nues in mud which rose to the very hubs of 
their wheels. Things are better now. Wash- 
ington has grown to be populous and well 
equipped. But it is still unspotted by indus- 
try; it requires the active, blundering efforts 
of the government Itself — as lately — to build 
chimneys big enough to stain its clear. South- 
ern sky. It has no trade and no manufactures. 
Rome is the only other uncommercial great 
capital In the world ; and even in Rome there 
has been for years a persistent, though unau- 
thenticated, story of the existence there of a 
corn-starch factory. Washington Is the resi- 
dence of political America and nothing more. 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 103 

If you withdrew the government of the U. S. 
A., it would at once vanish into thin air like 
an enchanted city in an Arabian tale. 

Just as in New York they talk Wall Street, 
in Philadelphia family, and in Boston books, 
so in Washington they talk politics. That, 
outside the national capital, we do not gen- 
erally discuss our national affairs is one of our 
American faults. It is the constant reproach 
of visiting foreigners, who in their own best 
society always find the men engaged in run- 
ning the country. It is some such recognition 
of its own incompleteness which is behind 
New York's deep conviction that Washington 
ought to be in New York rather than in the 
District of Columbia. It is just this social 
lack at home which drives so many of even the' 
silliest New-Yorkers to make flying trips to 
the Potomac. Perhaps they do not quite 
know it, but they go there to hear political talk 
and to see the American horizon widen till the 
Mississippi Valley and the Western moun- 
tains and the sunset over the Pacific come into 
view. 

The non-Washingtonian must record his 
gratitude that Washingtonians talk politics, 
even if they often talk stupidly and frivo- 
lously. The great dome of the Capitol is 
dimly seen in the background of every Wash- 
ingtonian picture. Gentlemen spitting in the 



104 American Towns and People 

lobbies of the cheaper hotels, and lovely ladies 
serving tea to foreign counts in Louis XVI. 
drawing-rooms, all talk the gossip of govern- 
ment. It is not too fantastic even to imagine 
that some sweet, underclad little debutante 
might in the intervals of the dance softly mur- 
mur some secret of the last Cabinet meeting. 
No one in Washington is so obscure as not to 
have some ''inside information." No one but 
has some connection with the government, has 
had, or hopes to have some such connection. 
The ebbing political tides leave very agree- 
able people on the Washingtonian rocks who 
linger on in idleness. Dolly Madison had a 
house for years just across the green from the 
greater residence where she had held her gay 
court; it is a pleasant example which might 
well be followed. Widows there are, and re- 
tired generals and admirals. Old gentlemen, 
too, who have been in the Senate and the 
Cabinet — too enfeebled for active political 
service, but quite strong enough to heave a 
stone at the White House whenever the fancy 
takes them. Such people are immensely ser- 
viceable in such a community. But for them, 
Washington would be merely a transient hotel, 
with a great part of the population evicted 
every four years. New Congressmen and 
others come to the capital as fresh as paint, and 
fortunately find there these retired sages who 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 105 

can school them in the ancient Washington 
tradition. Nothing in America is pleasanter 
than such an unofficial drawing-room, where, 
as dusk settles on the town and the palaces of 
the government, callers drop in with lightly 
given but authentic information as to how 
America stands that day in the world. There 
are agreeably embittered old ladies, too, who 
have watched statesmen come and go like the 
grass that is cut down. And belles through 
many administrations who confront life no 
more gayly on present-day terrapin and cham- 
pagne than in old times on chicken-salad and 
ice-cream and coffee. Pleasant survivals of 
an earlier time — trained, all of them, to talk 
politics and to gossip. 

Gossip, indeed — about serious matters and 
about matters of no importance whatever — 
forms the background of the Washington pic- 
ture. The town is already in what may be 
called its anecdotage. Washington, just by 
virtue of being uncommercial, is a personal 
town. Never anywhere in the world were 
there so many stories about people. They are 
told to-day in pleasant, leisure hours; they 
have been set down in many volumes of mem- 
oirs and in the innumerable records of the 
hordes of newspaper correspondents who have 
from the beginning fattened upon the capital. 
The stories are not always very important, not 



I06 American Towns and People 

always particularly significant. Still it is 
agreeable, for example, to know that a female 
journalist of an early day secured an interview 
with President John Quincy Adams while that 
august personage was bathing in the Potomac, 
as was his custom, from the foot of the White 
House grounds, by the usual expedient of re- 
moving his clothes, and thus keeping him in 
the water till he had answered her questions. 
It is also a pleasant minor fact that our once so 
popular song, "Listen to the Mocking-Bird," 
was first heard at a White House concert given 
in honor of the Prince of Wales. And it is 
piquant to learn of an early foreign ambassa- 
dor who was accustomed to beat his wife to 
the accompaniment of a 'cello played by his 
first secretary for the purpose of drowning her 
screams. Washington has a mellow past. 

Before tackling the majestic spectacle of the 
town's present, a word may be spared for the 
future. Not, perhaps, so much for the future 
as for the people of all kinds who come there 
with an eye upon that period — whose connec- 
tion with the government is that of hope de- 
ferred. Office-seeking has, through civil-ser- 
vice reform, lost something of its picturesque 
resemblance to the locusts invading Egypt. 
But the axes to grind which are unpacked in 
hotel bedrooms are still numerous. There are 
the usual conventional lobbyists seeking to 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 107 

dredge Mud Creek or to build a hundred- 
thousand-dollar post-office for Bird Center. 
You can tell them in the hotel offices by a cer- 
tain lean and hungry eagerness, and by a sort 
of Washington costume which they wear — it is 
not the statesman's traditional black broad- 
cloth, and yet it somehow manages to look as 
if it were. Then there are, besides, odd 
claimants and queer pretenders. There are 
tired old ladies in rusty black bonnets who, 
perhaps, hope still to be rich from the French 
Spoliation Claims, or look forward to induc- 
ing Congress to pension the third cousins of 
descendants of those who fought in the Mexi- 
can War. Inventors, too, are to be found, 
some on the very highroad to prosperity via 
the Patent Office, others destined to linger on 
for dreary years, pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp 
of some fantastic good fortune. In one little 
boarding-house in a seedy side-street half-way 
toward the Capitol there lately lived no less 
than three inventors of perpetual motion! — a 
situation reminiscent of a London legend of 
the jubilee of Queen Victoria, when, in a 
squalid Bloomsbury lodging-house, four em- 
presses, if they had their rights, once took tea 
together. "Cranks," as we call them, wander 
vaguely to and fro in all the shadows of the 
Washingtonian picture, like harmless, amiable 
ghosts, for the most part — half comic, half 



io8 American Towns and People 

tragic. Sometimes, however, the "crank's" 
eye is lit with some smoldering hate — already 
in the Washingtonian annals his murderous 
bullet has put the nation in mourning — the 
clouds along the murky horizon are lit oc- 
casionally with lightning. This queer, ob- 
scure world, this mere penumbra of the gov- 
ernment, is always present to the imaginative 
observer. But it must no longer delay con- 
templation of the great, clearly lime-lit, 
official world of those who are the vessels of 
to-day's governmental power and glory. This 
is a Washington composed and recomposed al- 
most every four years at the will of the people. 
These are the Washingtonians who have been 
defined by one old gentleman as merely the 
Americans who are not wanted at home. But 
such tart comments are negligible. This is 
the real Washington. 

The White House is far and away the most 
desirable residence to let at the national cap- 
ital. (This in spite of the nobility of Vice- 
Presidents, which of course obliges them to 
the generous tradition of Fillmore, who said, 
when he was called to the Executive Man- 
sion, "This is my first misfortune.") It is the 
most personal, most picturesque of the gov- 
ernment's possessions. Its history is the his- 
tory of many of our American ideals. 

In the early days of the Virginian dynasty 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 109 

of Presidents there were "levees" and "draw- 
ing-rooms" at the White House, and it shel- 
tered something very like a court. The court 
ideal dies hard. Even now the red-velvet 
rope, which in more effete civilization sep- 
arates the social sheep from the goats, is occa- 
sionally almost put into use when new admin- 
istrations try to have receptions where the 
privileged few are allowed a brief encounter 
with the royal presence in the Blue Room, 
serving temporarily as a holy of holies. The 
White House, as is natural, is the constant 
theater of the conflict to be observed every- 
where in American life between our wish to 
have an aristocracy and our wish not to. But, 
on the whole, the disinterested observer must 
adjudge victory to our deep-seated democracy 
which makes it really unsuitable that the 
White House should ever be exactly fash- 
ionable. 

We never forget not only that the Presi- 
dential residence is our house, but that the 
President in it is our man. The almost Uto- 
pian democracy of public receptions at the 
White House is both engaging and pictur- 
esque. In the early days Congressmen used 
to come to them with bowie-knives in their 
high, cowhide boots; and in Jackson's time 
guards with stout sticks beat back the guests 
while the food was being fetched from the 



1 10 American Towns and People 

kitchens. Then an evening party had all the 
charm of a riot. A diplomat complained not 
so long ago that even at the exclusive recep- 
tions for the Corps the American young ladies 
surreptitiously cut all the buttons off his 
clothes for souvenirs. 

Another diplomat, new to these democratic 
shores, arriving late for a New- Year's day 
reception, was astonished to find that the Ne- 
gro hackman who had driven him to the 
White House had slipped in ahead of him 
and was the first to grasp the Presidential 
hand! He could not understand that the 
Executive hand is as much the people's prop- 
erty as the mansion. Mr. Washington did 
not shake hands, but since then every Presi- 
dential paw has been squeezed by the pop- 
ulace almost beyond the power of flaxseed 
poultices or massage to bring it back to any- 
thing like original shape. The shake is ex- 
pected to be wholesome and hearty — even a 
Boston gentleman complained, under Tyler's 
administration, that he had caught cold from 
shaking the President's hand. 

Even while we pay respect to Presidents, 
we like them to feel that they are like our- 
selves. An ex-President's wife tells a story 
of her daughter ordering shoes in Philadel- 
phia and asking that they should be sent and 
charged to Mrs. William Howard Taft, The 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan ill 

White House, Washington. The name and 
address were delivered with a simple, nat- 
ural, and unpretentious pride. But the 
shop young lady merely inquired, brightly, 
''D. C?" 

The White House soon ceased to be a pal- 
ace and became more and more an "ideal 
American home." Its corridors are haunted 
by the domestic virtues. It supplies the fem- 
inine element so necessary in governments — 
and some say in religions. Let a marriage or 
a birth take place in the White House, and 
countless thousands over the land dissolve in a 
sentimental ecstasy of domestic emotion. It 
is, indeed, difficult for an inmate of the man- 
sion to remain single or to practice race sui- 
cide there — vox populi seems to forbid. 

The White House is, in fact, a sort of na- 
tional shrine. The life of its inhabitants is 
closely watched by the lynx-eyed all over the 
country, ready and willing to detect any vari- 
ation from the national moral standard. 
There is no detail of White House life or ad- 
ministration too small to be lit by the lime- 
light. As early as John Quincy Adams there 
was bitter criticism of the immorality of put- 
ting a billiard-table into the White House. 
Even the question of Presidential "cuspi- 
dors" — But no apology need be offered for 
grappling with a subject which in any 



112 American Towns and People 

thoughtful survey of American life and social 
conditions deserves an attention not hitherto 
given it by serious writers. Treated at length, 
the utensil might gain an almost epic quality; 
for the day was when a good aim at it gave 
you a position in the community in which you 
lived. Here it can only be used to illustrate 
how the White House conservatively and dis- 
creetly marks the rising tide of national re- 
finement. President Van Buren was accused 
of extravagance and luxury in having 
equipped the official residence too freely and 
elegantly. Impassioned patriots from the 
West roused anti-administration enthusiasm 
by descriptions of a simple wooden box of 
sawdust. And yet only a comparatively few 
decades later, under President Arthur, the 
White House cuspidors were — possibly pre- 
maturely — sold at public auction! 

To speak seriously, year by year the Presi- 
dent's house pretty fairly represents our na- 
tional ideals. And there are simple anecdotes 
in its history, like the one of a President's turn- 
ing handsprings for his little sons only three 
hours before he was assassinated, which must 
move any American deeply with a sense of his 
genuine indigenous democracy. American- 
ism, as a word, sometimes seems to be a little 
flyblown these days. But its reality is proven 
by the very way in which, estimating Wash- 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 113 

ington, we know we must inevitably give the 
precedence to the official world. 

There is a heroic, almost grandiose, quality 
in Washington official society. And here the 
bare facts and figures about "calling" speak 
more eloquently than can any commentator 
upon them. In hurried centers of civilization, 
such as New York, "the call" is remembered 
merely as something mother used to make. 
In Washington it survives not quaintly, but 
in full vigor. 

A woman whose husband is fairly high up 
in governmental circles makes, if she does her 
duty, between fifteen and eighteen hundred 
calls a winter! These calls have to be made 
on the official day of each hostess — the Sen- 
ate ladies, for example, receive only on Thurs- 
days — an arrangement which ingeniously and 
cruelly distributes the calling over the whole 
season. 

There is an elaborate ritual of calls, depend- 
ent upon official rank. Of course we are too 
young a country to have anything as marvel- 
ous as the table in the British Peerage by 
which you may learn that the Hon. Muriel 
Snaggs is accurately the eighteen-hundred- 
and-thirty-ninth most important person in the 
United Kingdom. But precedence flourishes 
in Washington. The Cabinet calls first on 
the Senate, but the House calls first on the 



114 American Towns and People 

Cabinet. The hardest Initiation, of course, is 
of those who must call first on the four hun- 
dred and thirty-five representatives. Calls 
must be returned on the first official day, if 
there is no official day within three days. 
There is more, but this much must serve to 
suggest the horrors of a monstrous system. 

There have been, of course, individual re- 
volts and concerted attempts at simplification. 
A "Congressional Club" was lately formed to 
herd women together that they might be 
called upon en masse. To give one instance, 
over fifty Congressional ladies living in the 
same hotel banded together to receive. On ar- 
rival you were confronted by baskets to re- 
ceive cards — over fifty, all sweetly ornamented 
with bows of pink ribbon. Is the scene not 
one Watteau would have loved to paint? Be- 
yond the pretty baskets were the Congressional 
ladies' hands, over fifty, to be shaken; over 
fifty lovely birds to be killed, as it were, with 
one stone. But, unhappily, it was soon ru- 
mored that the banded ladies did not consider 
this a call, but only an agreeable opportunity 
to make acquaintance before the formal indi- 
vidual visits. The car of Juggernaut was 
weighted a little more heavily, that was all. 

A victim must be quoted : she makes eight- 
een hundred calls a year, not counting pri- 
vate or unofficial calls — pleasure calls, if you 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 115 

care so to describe them. She says, simply and 
touchingly, "I find I must give up a great deal 
in order to accomplish all this and not kill 
myself." But she goes on in a strain of im- 
passioned and martyred optimism which, 
somehow, makes one understand that the sys- 
tem cannot be changed: "In one way it is a 
blessing. Wives from different parts of the 
country meet; there is an exchange of ideas 
and views, and a better understanding between 
the sections. Washington is different from 
any other place, and it is a pity not to enjoy it 
to the full as it is." 

Even outside official circles, calling pre- 
vails. When Miss Harriet Martineau, years 
ago, arrived in Washington, four hundred 
strangers called on her during the first twenty- 
four hours. Women who have moved to 
Washington ostensibly for their own pleasure 
have been known to spend an hour every day 
of their lives calling. It becomes not only a 
habit, but a passion — a passion exemplified in 
the Washington lady who was described by 
her "friend" as "such a sweet, good-natured 
woman ; she returns your call even when you 
haven't made one!" 

Almost the highest comedy of democracy 
is said to be the first reception-days of green 
Congressional wives, an experience to which 
these gallant women advance each year in 



Il6 American Towns and People 

solid formation. One is almost glad to hear 
of a deserter. There was a wayward, rebel- 
lious, and charming Congressional creature re- 
cently who, as the fateful hour approached 
when she was to be "at home," suddenly put 
on her hat and bolted, panic-stricken, round 
the block. But when, forcing herself to pass 
her house again, she saw a group of ladies 
ringing her door-bell, she impulsively joined 
them and went in. Was she not, like them, 
a Congressman's wife with a right to call any- 
where, even upon herself? They sat down 
and, while waiting for the hostess, chatted 
agreeably. And when, at the end of it, the 
callers began to comment wonderingly upon 
the continued absence of the lady of the house, 
our heroine smiled enigmatically: "I don't 
believe," she said, "we had any of us better 
wait any longer for her. I hear — " she 
paused and she spoke with meaning — "I hear 
she's very odd!" She rose, and the other 
ladies with her. She went on with them to 
call on another Congressman's wife. 

Congressmen themselves do not call a great 
deal, it goes without saying. Their leisure is 
traditionally spent with their feet either high 
above their heads upon the mantelpiece of 
under the poker-table — though at the national 
game the Senate is supposed to surpass the 
House. Indeed, even more than the compan- 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 117 

ionship of champagne-haired female secre- 
taries and lobbyists, are cards supposed to fill 
the rakish idle hours of Senators. Foreign- 
ers, hearing statesmen whisper chucklingly to 
one another of "full houses," are said to have 
rushed vainly to Capitol Hill, expecting great 
events in the halls of legislation. Congress- 
men have, of course, been changing with the 
years. They motor now and play golf at 
Chevy Chase, and some of them "clean up 
and go out to dinner" when night falls. In- 
deed, the government itself encourages their 
softer side. It was for a long time possible 
for Congressmen to have bouquets sent free to 
ladies from the government greenhouses — cu- 
pid's "graft." Even the most reluctant Ameri- 
can male cannot wholly withstand the influ- 
ence of a town which is essentially human and 
intimate, in the sense that its inhabitants are 
extraordinarily dependent upon one another 
for all their amusement. Indeed, what else 
have they upon which they could depend? 

Upon this point the diplomatic colony, ac- 
customed to the agrements of the capitals of 
the world, might be consulted, if they only 
dared to speak frankly. Washingtonians they 
have always found hospitable and agreeable, 
but Washington, as a town, a desert. There 
are few restaurants. There is no opera and 
little music. There are theaters, and there 



ii8 American Towns and People 

was once a happy period for their managers 
when rival political parties demonstrated their 
social strength by going to the play in large 
and brilliant bands. 

Everybody in Washington can be at an 
evening party, for everybody is in society of 
some sort. There are no lower classes, man- 
ual labor being performed almost exclusively 
by blacks, who, without unfriendliness, may 
be described as socially non-existent. Every- 
body has some one to call upon and to be en- 
tertained by. So aggravated does Washing- 
ton's social activity sometimes seem that it has 
been described as "a town where the streets 
are always empty and the houses always 
crowded." 

Early in Washingtonian history the packed 
sardine became the social ideal. A success- 
ful evening at the White House in Mrs. Madi- 
son's time was colloquially termed a "squeeze," 
while its melancholy opposite was described 
as a "thin" drawing-room. A philosophic 
female critic of those days put forth the the- 
ory that Washington women had a position 
far in advance of any others in the country 
because their parties were so crowded that 
ladies could not sit and wait decorously for 
gentlemen to approach them, but instead stood, 
walked about, and even sometimes ventured 
to speak first themselves ! The habit of crowd- 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 119 

Ing extends beyond the White House. Once 
at one of the Oriental embassies some four 
or five hundred quite uninvited guests forced 
their way in and left only when the sly East- 
erners actually put burning pepper in a jar 
to drive them out! 

There is a story always prevalent at the 
capital of a strange race of indigenous in- 
habitants who antedate its establishment. 
These are supposed to be the descendants of 
the aristocratic first families of Georgetown 
— that now faded, lovely little city near which 
the founders of Washington built. To them, 
it is alleged, the governmental town still 
seems modern and vulgar, and its inhabitants 
simply people one does not know. In their 
shabby but exquisite Georgian drawing-rooms 
they lurk, sipping China tea out of thin, an- 
cestral cups. No one knows them, visits them, 
or, indeed, has ever seen them. This is, of 
course, what makes possible the pretty legend. 
Every one should try to believe it; it lends a 
soft, fragrant, Southern bloom to the shadows 
of the somewhat over-colored picture of na- 
tional society gathered from every corner of 
the country. 

Outside "official" society there has been 
from the beginning a smaller and more fash- 
ionable circle at the capital, to which many 
of the chosen of the people from the remoter 



I20 American Towns and People 

districts have seemed a little uncouth. (A 
Philadelphian Washingtonian of the early 
days was amused by two Senators who had 
never seen a "forte-piano," as she termed that 
musical instrument.) 

Politics — and Senators — are sometimes the 
fashion with this set, sometimes not. Just now 
they are pretty much in vogue, having come 
in with intelligence and "uplift," and broader 
interests and other fashionable fads. But the 
day, not so far back, can be remembered in 
Washington when in the beau monde ladies 
said, "We had the Senator to dine last night," 
it was quite clear who was meant, as there 
was only one Senator who could be trusted 
to eat in the open. And, so little as ten years 
ago, gay parties were made up to visit the 
Capitol, rather as one went to the Zoo, to see 
a representative who was said never to have 
washed. Even now you can hear in Wash- 
ington that an administration is or is not fash- 
ionable, and learn of periods when it is not 
at all "the thing" to go to the White House. 
All this is pleasant and piquant, though we, 
the plain people, know in our hearts that the 
third cousin of a Congressman's wife in white 
wool and rubbers, making her way' on the 
street-car to "pour" at an afternoon tea is 
more the real thing than the most fashionable 
unofficial lady, in whatever corresponds in 




The austere towers of the Smithsonian Institute. 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 121 

modern life to the traditional point-lace and 
diamonds, going out in the most inclosed lim- 
ousine to dine at an embassy. The more ele- 
gant of the two females is, after all, only a 
camp-follower, an exquisite vivandiere in at- 
tendance upon the great political army. 

So many settlers have frankly migrated to 
the capital for its softer climate and its greater 
social advantages that Washington has be- 
come a national clearing-house for agreeable 
people from all regions of the country. The 
capital is, in our land, about the only place 
except the grave to which people may "retire" 
with any- hope of peace. Indeed, its air of 
leisure and its freedom from commerce make 
it in certain aspects almost like a watering- 
place, a health resort. 

Every one is welcome in Washington — 
though this is no complete catalogue. The 
capital is, to take one example, "peculiarly 
indicated," as they say abroad in pamphlets 
about watering-places, for rich widows, who, 
in a mild Interest in politics and in the sooth- 
ing conversation of the younger diplomats, 
find some assuagement. They build their 
lovely palaces and spin their frail webs in all 
the principal cross-roads. And every year 
ladies w^ho are, like Melisande, not quite 
happy at home move to Washington. There 
are Bostonians who cannot bear Boston, and 



122 American Towns and People 

Chicagoans who cannot stand Chicago. Also 
many who cannot quite decide to live abroad, 
and so compromise on the capital. Washing- 
ton is, in fact, almost the great American so- 
cial adventure, the melting-pot of Americans 
themselves. 

Washington used to be a city of boarding- 
houses — at one of them in the '40's a distin- 
guished foreign visitor quite by chance had 
Mr. Henry Clay next her at the breakfast- 
table — and even now it is permissible for a 
Vice-President to inhabit a hotel. But the 
glory of the boarding-house is waning. Now- 
adays there are plenty of palaces, much ele- 
gance, and excellent champagne. There are 
moments when Washington, even official 
Washington, seems merely gay and fashion- 
able. But through it all there is the homely 
homespun quality which we can still claim as 
American. There was a stor}'', not long ago, 
of a Secretary of State who met a newly ar- 
rived ambassador of a great European Power 
for the first time at an evening party. 

"The boys up at the Department were tell- 
ing me this morning," began Mr. Secretary, 
genially, "that there were some difficulties be- 
tween your country and mine." 

"Yes, yes," murmured the astonished for- 
eigner, who had been sent especially to discuss 
this serious matter of a lapsed treaty. 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 123 

"Oh, that's all right," pursued the Secre- 
tary. "I told the boys I didn't know much 
about it, but I was sure the trouble wasn't as 
serious as they thought. We'll fix it." And 
here he turned to where the ambassador's 
proud and distinguished wife stood, talking 
to Mrs. Secretary. "If your husband and I 
can't get this straightened out," said he, beam- 
ingly, "then you and mamma must put your 
heads together and do it for us — that's all!" 

In a town where primitive democratic sim- 
plicity stands thus unabashed before efifete 
Europe, it is obvious that much social gayety 
is essentially tentative and educational. Wash- 
ington is our great national school of "dining- 
out." 

With all the development of American 
civilization, "dining-out" has still — let us be 
honest — for the greater part of the native-born 
a character at once semi-sacred and terrifying. 
The magazine advertisements give glimpses 
of our easier, more genuinely characteristic 
circles, where the arrival of guests is signal- 
ized by the decanning of some beans and the 
opening of a bottle of Ohio champagne. And 
ladies may arrive in Washington with the 
conception, so prevalent in the most popular 
books and plays, that a butterfly of fashion is 
mainly occupied with bridge parties and aft- 
ernoon teas. But at the capital they soon 



124 American Towns and People 

wake to the fact that even a "ladies' lunch," 
however prettily the table and the salad may 
be decorated, gets them nowhere; and that 
only formal, concerted, night feeding is so- 
cially valuable. 

In Washington, however, as everywhere in 
America, man lags behind in all social ac- 
tivities. The burden of eating and overeat- 
ing always falls heavily on a comparatively 
small band of dining males. You take in the 
same lady pretty often. Apropos of this, there 
is a story of a weary young Washingtonian 
who proposed marriage in this impassioned 
phrase, "You see, dear, if we are married 
they'll have to stop putting us next each other 
at dinner." 

It is needless to insist upon the value, in such 
a society, of aliens, who eat out easily. In- 
deed, it can scarcely be wondered at if second, 
third, and fourth secretaries of the embassies 
come to believe that the services expected of 
them are wholly gastronomic. There was a 
preposterous story at the time when Washing- 
ton's chief club burned that, in its very smok- 
ing ruins, young diplomats were seen by the 
firemen hurriedly counting their boiled shirts 
to make sure that they could still dine out 
every night that week! 

A young American girl may learn to reject 
foreigners almost as well in Washington as 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 125 

abroad — or to marry them. Since the begin- 
ning, the ladies of the capital have made dis- 
tinguished, picturesque, romantic alliances 
with Europe, from the Georgetown girl who 
married the Russian ambassador and became 
the famous Madame Bodesco, to Jackson's 
Peggy Eaton, who in her old age married an 
Italian dancing-master who rewarded her by 
eloping with her fortune and her favorite 
grandchild! 

American men are not linguists, and an am- 
bassador was once introduced to a gentleman 
who immediately described himself, '^Moi, je 
suis le senateur qui parle frangais/^ Yet, 
somehow, even without the languages, agree- 
able relations go on, and pleasant friendships 
are made. Washington, perhaps more than 
travels, teaches us how like ourselves foreign- 
ers really are. And they have made notable 
contributions to our American civilization. 
Ice-cream — pie's only rival in our national 
afifections — was actually introduced as a nov- 
elty at a party at the French ambassador's, 
and it Is significant that, as a chronicler of 
the time reports, "the guests were so impatient 
for it that there was great disorder." 

The war, with its resultant solemn and at 
first tragic inhibitions, somewhat withdrew 
foreigners from the Washingtonian picture. 
But they soon again diversified and enlivened 



126 American Towns and People 

it as they have from its earliest days. It is 
but simple justice to say that they contribute 
enormously to the capital's famous "pleasant- 
ness," to its half-gay, half-cultured air of ease. 
Art has no special place in Washington, cer- 
tainly no Bohemian haunts; but it has, as it 
were, an excellent social position. Foreigners, 
who have all been on easy terms with it in 
the capitals of Europe, find it neither unnat- 
ural nor unmanly to speak of it here without 
shame. It is not obligatory in Washington to 
have cultivated tastes, but on the whole they 
are not thought badly of. Indeed, many ad- 
vantages of life abroad are to be had by the 
Potomac, including leisure. Washington is 
not merely a city of magnificent distances — 
to quote the phrase for which it is indebted to 
a Portuguese diplomat of its earliest days — 
it is also a town of spacious leisure for amuse- 
ment. Perhaps the most powerful impression 
it makes upon the stranger is of its broad, sun- 
lit idleness. The great, sleepy avenues are 
typical of the town's immunity from toil. 
Government, the only business there, cannot be 
carried on without some slight effort, but the 
servants of a democracy are rarely over- 
worked. The eight-hour day has long been 
an intolerable burden to Washingtonians. 
Clerks leave the departments for the day at 
an hour when hard-working New York brok- 



Washington, the Cosmopolitan 127 

ers are just recovering from the luncheon 
champagne and preparing to tackle the after- 
noon's business. Washingtonians, indeed, al- 
ways seem to have time for all the things for 
which the inhabitants of our huge, lively com- 
mercial centers have no time — for morning 
walks, for pleasant afternoon talks, and for 
knowing everything about one another's af- 
fairs. It is, as some foreigner aptly put it, the 
salon of America. 

Though Washingtonians pass, Washington 
itself lives. The city has an individuality, a 
tone which cannot but affect its inhabitants. 
Its amazing, though only half-appreciated, 
architectural beauty must, even though they 
are unconscious of it, transmute somewhat the 
arid New-Englander and the uncouth West- 
erner. A bland climate where the crocus 
often pushes through the grass in late January 
must help teach people how to be idle and 
amiably gossipy. The town is pleasant — that 
is almost its most obvious characteristic — and 
pleasant in a warm, well-fed. Southern way 
which is irresistible. The Washingtonian airs 
are almost as redolent of good cooking as the 
Philadelphian. The capital lies in the great 
food-belt of the Chesapeake Bay and the Vir- 
ginian tidewater country. Washington always 
seems near the source of supplies. You used 
occasionally to see in the main shopping 



128 American Towns and People 

streets countrymen with three or four ducks 
to sell. And even now the game laws are mys- 
teriously relaxed for the benefit of the capital 
— many a New-Yorker takes the trip to Wash- 
ington just to eat quail. The markets are 
sprawled over broad streets in a generous con- 
fusion. Here and there toiling blacks and 
turbaned negresses make you realize that this 
is Southern plenty. In spite of all the im- 
provements to the hotels, the best and most 
characteristic eating-place is the famous oys- 
ter-house of nineteenth-century furniture and 
odors, where the bivalve, roasted, is served 
with a sauce such as never was by sea or land 
by grinning, cheerful black waiters, and an 
even blacker cook whom you instinctively ad- 
dress as "Snowball." 

The traditional Washingtonian cook Is a 
happy person of color, preparing his admir- 
able dishes with gusto and abandon. He 
grows rarer, of course, as the old South passes. 
But to encounter such a one is good fortune, 
even if it be for nothing more than a half- 
hour's gastronomic gossip. The occasion is 
here seized to record such a brief meeting with 
a distinguished old gentleman of color, de- 
scribed by a competent authority as the best 
cook in America. As a boy, so he explained, 
he had been apprenticed in Philadelphia to a 
famous cook who was then an old man. His 




/-lHn|%^^ 




Washington, the Cosmopolitan 129 

cooking recipes thus go back to Revolution- 
ary days, with only one transference from 
hand to hand. It is impossible not to feel 
that these formulas, never committed to writ- 
ing or to print, are the sacred secrets of an 
ancient and honorable profession. It is ab- 
surd, perhaps, but a vivid, pleasant sense of 
the country's long history is warmed into pa- 
triotic being as one thinks that Mr. Washing- 
ton may have eaten with relish of, shall we say, 
''snapping- turtle soup"? This, says the old 
man who now alone can prepare it, "we used 
to make when the season for terrapin was 
over"; and he adds, in a decorous, courtly. 
Southern way, "It was considered one of the 
best of our riverside dishes." Does not the 
last phrase suggest delightfully the great Po- 
tomac, and the pleasant country, and, more, 
that the capital has by the famous river's 
course eaten this many a year good food and 
drunk good wine and talked good talk? 

Washington, when the day's work of gov- 
erning the land is over, is a great, warm, sun- 
lit, spacious, idle drawing-room where one can 
savor to the full the flavor of our own Ameri- 
can land. Even the dullest imagination must, 
on Capitol Hill, stir to some sense of the pag- 
eant of our history, to some memories of all the 
great Americans who have through the years 
streamed here to the country's heart. The 



130 American Towns and People 

town's name must, even while we are gay and 
idle and gossipy, mean something, commemo- 
rate somehow the Father of his Country. He 
who rode horseback over the lovely, wooded 
Maryland hills to choose its site does indeed 
still haunt them; now they are crowned with 
marble. He lives. And Lincoln, perhaps. 
And many others if we have heart and eyes to 
see them. They, too, make the town pleasant. 



Baltimore 

FOR the sentimental traveler in our coun- 
try one of the pleasantest adventures will 
always be his start down the Atlantic seaboard 
and his eager watch for the first signs that he 
has come into the romantic South. There has 
been an amazing change of feeling in these 
peaceful post-bellum days; it is scarcely fan- 
tastic or paradoxical to say that it is the North- 
erner now who is tenderest of the memories of 
that earlier, lovelier South. Yet the North- 
erner, on his romantic journey, is only too apt 
to think that until he has at least crossed the 
Potomac he is still in his own country. In- 
deed, it is often only orange trees and palms 
which will finally convince him. But latitude 
and climate are not everything; North is 
North and South is South in spite of them. 
Even if the snow flies as his train pulls into 
Baltimore, he should descend from it, for he 
is passing the South's metropolis, her strong- 
est, richest city — near the Northern frontier, 
it is true, but proudly asserting her right to 
act and to speak for the South, even though 
in those old war days she was racked and 

131 



132 American Towns and People 

torn by two loyalties, burnt and martyred by 
the flames of tsvo patriotisms. 

Baltimore's present ''Southernness" is not 
perhaps the kind of thing wholly demonstra- 
ble. True, you will at once hear the unmis- 
takable accent upon everybody's lips. And 
you will find the black race on every hand, 
often in picturesque destitution and the classic 
dishevelment and bandanna head-dress, but 
oftener in amazing prosperity and, especially 
in Druid Hill Park of a Sunday, in dazzling 
and immaculate raiment. But the Southern 
quality, which for the sentimental traveler 
hangs over everything like a veil, is more 
elusive. There are streets of red brick houses 
which, but for the grace of God, might be on 
Beacon Hill in Boston. There are white 
marble steps no more shining than those in 
the Quaker neighbor, Philadelphia. There is 
no hint of decay or neglect to suggest the near- 
ness of the easy-going subtropics. Yet some- 
how it is possible to detect a softer grace, a 
Southern richness of bloom. These are the 
people who so naturally speak of their door- 
steps as "pleasure porches," and call a strip of 
beach along the Chesapeake a "pleasure 
shore." In fact, there is always a hint of leis- 
ure about Baltimorean activity — the "rush 
hour" comes early. And there seems all 
through the day more time than in most places 



Baltimore 133 

for the smaller courtesies; probably nowhere 
are so many women overburdened with heavy 
market-baskets helped to mount the car steps. 
Those market-baskets, too, hint at good living, 
"Southern style." But Baltimore's title of 
"gastronomic capital of America" must be 
treated later, more at length, and in a style 
more impassioned and lyric. It must be 
enough now to say that there is all through 
the town a sense of that richer cuisine, that 
more frank enjoyment of the pleasures of the 
table, which here with us, just as in France, 
to cite a suitable gastronomic example, tells 
you that you are headed Southward. 

Baltimore's streets are little vexed by tour- 
ists, for the most part undisturbed by the 
rumble and the megaphones of "sightseeing 
wagons." Lounging along them, it is possible 
to have something of that pride of discoverer 
and explorer which to any true lover of towns 
and sights gives such a warming proprietary 
feeling. Baltimore is so near at hand that it 
seems obvious — and is neglected. It has, it 
must be admitted, few definite "sights," ex- 
cept an admirable gallery of paintings^ which 
is unaccountably kept closed for almost half 
the year. There is, if you like, little to see — 
just the town itself. But the town itself is 
so very pleasant! 

At the very beginning it is almost inevitable 



134 American Towns and People 

that one should speak of the monument to 
Washington. It is around it, sitting upon its 
green hill, that the town groups itself, and to 
it, in a way, that one's memories of Baltimore 
cling. The monument still manages, in spite 
of the passing of almost a century and the 
coming of steel construction and skyscrapers, 
to dominate the Baltimorean scene. It will 
probably be the center of the view from your 
hotel window. You will see it in its small 
park, surrounded by respectable pleasant 
streets of spacious old brick houses, and be- 
yond it the gilded domes of the old Roman 
Catholic cathedral, giving a curious exotic 
touch to the picture, while they also remind 
you of the Calverts and the early days of the 
Catholic colony. You may perhaps see flying 
against the blue sky a flag with the colors of 
the Calverts; colors worn, too, in the Mary- 
land thickets by the Baltimore oriole. But 
the eye will come back to the gray pledge of 
Maryland's loyalty, the first memorial set up 
in the whole country to the great Washing- 
ton. 

The column is perhaps of no great intrinsic 
beauty, its proportions have even been de- 
scribed by the irreverent as "dumpy," but any- 
thing so skillfully placed would have an effect, 
and, in fact, the shaft has the solemn, yet 
good-natured, dignity of which the eighteenth 



Baltimore 135 

century and the first quarter of the nineteenth 
knew so well the trick. It has very definitely 
"an air." You take off your hat to it, with 
some show of old-fashioned politeness, and 
you realize that you are in a "gentleman's 
town." 

Mount Vernon and Washington Places 
form a Maltese cross of green, in which there 
are statues of local men of note, a Barye lion, 
and some good bronze groups of Peace and 
War contemplating a scene now so manifestly 
devoted to the former. Down the hill in front 
goes a path broken by steps, statues, and a 
fountain, and bordered by green bushes and 
rose-trellises. There is a pleasant legend of 
a gay return from the ball, when, to win a mad 
bet, a famous belle of an earlier day plunged 
into the marble basin of the fountain, a lovely 
naiad in a satin frock. Such memories, how- 
ever, do not disturb the present decorum of 
the scene. Indeed, from the foot of the hill, 
to see the Father of His Country keeping 
guard over his city of Baltimore is a se- 
renely solemn thing. You remember that it 
was over Fort McHenry down the bay that the 
star-spangled banner floated which inspired 
our national song, sung for the first time in the 
old Holliday Street Theatre, on a site where 
you may now hear the villain of modest- 
priced melodrama tear a passion to tatters. 



136 American Towns and People 

Curiously enough, however, for all the 
memories of '76 and 18 12, there is scarcely a 
town in the country which still so definitely 
keeps its English characteristics and seems so 
to have preserved the continuity of its tradi- 
tions. The mere names of the streets are a 
delight. Alpaca Alley, Apple Court, April 
Alley, and Apricot Court — the alphabet be- 
gins well. There are, of course, the names 
which suggest history, Calvert and Howard 
Streets, and Cathedral Street shedding peace. 
Also Charles Street, which, humorously 
enough, is prolonged by Charles Street Ave- 
nue, and this by Charles Street Avenue Ex- 
tension. But there are also Crooked Lane, 
Comet Street, and Crab Court, Cuba Street, 
China Street — remember the days of Balti- 
more clipper-ships — Featherbed Lane, and 
Fawn Street. Friendship is a street, an alley, 
an avenue, and a court. There is Lovegrove 
Alley now, and there used to be Lovely Lane. 
Johnny-Cake Road still leads to Johnny-Cake 
Town. Jew Alley, Madeira Court, Maiden 
Choice Lane, Nero Alley, Pen Lucy Avenue, 
Pin Alley, Plover Street, and Plum Row — 
can London itself do better? And naturally 
there is Petticoat Lane. Plowman Street, 
Sarah Ann Street — but the list already gives 
the authentic British flavor of Baltimorean 
nomenclature. 



Baltimore 137 

Charles Dickens noted the British quality in 
the Baltimore of his day. 

"The most comfortable of all hotels in the 
United States," he says, "is Barnum's, where 
the English traveler will find curtains to his 
bed, for the first and probably the last time 
in America." 

There is more, not complimentary to the 
rest of the country, about finding enough 
water for washing in the bedrooms. And 
it is possible to argue about the good of bed- 
curtains. Still, as a contemporary bit of evi- 
dence on our special point it is interesting. 

There has never been a great foreign popu- 
lation in this part of Maryland, beyond a re- 
spectable sprinkling of Germans. The names 
above the shops are largely English names, 
and the faces in the streets are for the most 
part American faces, a state of things un- 
known to the present generation in such towns 
as Boston, New York, or Chicago. It has 
been easy, under such conditions, for old cus- 
toms to survive. Even in the newspapers old 
phrases still are found. An auctioneer, for 
example, advertises the sale of furniture be- 
longing to "a well-known family now declin- 
ing housekeeping." Madeira and port are 
still occasionally drunk in Baltimore from 
the ancestral cellars of old-school gentlemen 
living about Mount Vernon Place, and, until 



138 American Towns and People 

lately at modest wine-dealers' bars by the or- 
dinary clerk or artisan, who everywhere else 
in the country would have either fuddled him- 
self with spirits or ruined his digestion with 
ice-cream sodas. Occasionally, as happens in 
America, can be found a custom long passed 
by in the older country. You might hunt the 
length and breadth of England without find- 
ing what you may see in Baltimore, the sign- 
board of a barber who professes himself 
ready to do ^'cupping and leeching," this 
queer eighteenth-century trade surviving al- 
most at the very gates of the great Johns Hop- 
kins Hospital and its modern medical school. 

At the top of the steps up to the monument 
you perhaps saw a colored vendor of flowers, 
making a gay patch against the green and 
gray. He was probably the only flower mer- 
chant from whom it would be the correct 
thing to buy at that place. For there is al- 
ways in Baltimore one shop to which one 
should go. Immemorial custom, the con- 
tinued patronage of the gentry, have settled 
where you must purchase everything, from a 
fresh tgg to a tiara. Yet the other shops have 
a trim and satisfactory air, and somehow the 
respectability of those of a prosperous county- 
town in England. 

The English connection was a close one in 
the early days, even after the Revolution. 



Baltimore 139 

The daughters of one single family became 
the Marchioness of Wellesley and the Duchess 
of Leeds. You could find some beautiful por- 
traits, by painters such as Sir Thomas Law- 
rence, both of Baltimoreans of that day and of 
their friends across the Atlantic, friends 
highly placed and famous, in the deserted and 
dusty rooms which used to house the His- 
torical Society. The hillside street where the 
rather depressed-looking mid-Victorian build- 
ing of the society stood was one of the few in 
Baltimore which seemed forgotten and dilapi- 
dated. No one appeared to visit the pictures, 
almost no one the library, where a few readers 
lurked in the gloom to which you penetrated 
to see an admirable portrait of Washington. 
To the romantically inclined, these visitors 
there could be no others than the last repre- 
sentatives of proud but decaying Baltimorean 
families. Indeed, to a sympathetic eye the 
town constantly suggested, quite as it should, 
the persistence of a colonial aristocracy. 

There are legends, of course, as there are in 
every Southern town, illustrative of the pride 
of birth, all charming stories, but mostly of 
one pattern. There is one house, however, of 
which they tell you tales a little dififerent. It 
belonged once to a family of Portuguese Jews, 
emigrants from a country where their race, 
more than anywhere else in the world, traces 



140 Americati Towns and People 

its lineage back into the mists of immemorial 
antiquity. They were strict religionists, even 
maintaining a private synagogue in their 
house near the very street where the Cardinal 
may still occasionally be seen taking the air. 
They were proud socially, too, and were re- 
ceived on equal terms by the Gentile aristoc- 
racy. Their odd pathetic story is of the 
gradual dying out of the family. They were 
too orthodox to marry any but Jews, they were 
too well-born to condescend to any of their 
fellow religionists in this country. The 
daughters, strictly reared in the family re- 
ligion and the family pride, faded one by one 
to spinsterhood, all but one lovely girl, of 
whom they tell the romantic tale that she ran 
away — and was forever forgotten. For a time 
mesalliances on the part of some hot-blooded 
son preserved the name. Then finally it was 
lost, and only these queer memories survive. 

The numberless antique-furniture shops 
will, naturally enough, provide daily tales of 
an impoverished lady just on the point of part- 
ing with exactly the piece you were looking 
for. And though you may have a moment's 
suspicion that the whistling and hammering 
in an upper room come from a cheerful Ger- 
man-American workman now fabricating — 
and "antiquating" — the furniture of this un- 



Baltimore 141 

happy gentlewoman, if you have a nice nature, 
you will believe in her. 

It is paintings, however, the sale of which 
is oftenest accompanied by all the eccentricity 
which is the privilege of a long-existent so- 
ciety. There was a Vandyck, if you please, to 
be had one spring at the best ladies' hair- 
dressing establishment, and a Murillo on sale 
in the parlor of an employment agency. You 
might believe in their authenticity or not, as 
you liked, but there they were. And there is 
even more. 

There was to be found in one of the least- 
frequented corners of the town an extensive 
collection of paintings, which had not spared 
the Italian, English, Dutch, French, nor Span- 
ish schools of art. It was on sale — after a 
fashion. That is to say, it was not offered, but 
to any one who might casually stumble on it, 
the owner would confess, with some hesitancy 
and shyness, that she would like to turn it 
into money. She was a pleasant, middle-aged 
lady, dressed in a fashion that somehow made 
you think of Godey's Ladies' Book. She was 
no professed connoisseur of art. But her 
father was fond of paintings, and these "used 
to be about the house." She was always fond 
of the Murillo, but she herself liked the blue 
of the Titian better before the picture was re- 



142 American Towns and People 

painted by that Italian from New York who 
did so much cleaning up for her father. (As 
to the Titian she was unmistakably right. As 
things now stand the version of the same sub- 
ject in the Uffizi at Florence is the better 
painting.) Still, she liked the pictures, all of 
them, and was not modern enough to be 
troubled by any doubts as to their authenticity. 
Indeed, had not the portrait of the Dauphin 
of France been recognized as such by several 
visitors unmistakably foreign, and possibly, so 
she suspected, emissaries of the French gov- 
ernment? And did not an agent of the Boston 
Museum of Art once obtain access to the col- 
lection disguised as a steel-worker on strike? 
There was a local expert of some skill in this 
matter of paintings, and it was once delicately 
hinted to the lady of the collection that if he 
were to examine and guarantee her pictures 
their sale might be easier. She, bless her for 
it! drew herself up delicately, and made an 
answer which the sentimental tourist himself 
could never have invented and put in the 
mouth of any proud aristocrat. 

'*I scarcely think his opinion could be very 
valuable," she objected. "His family lived 
near ours for many years, but we did not visit 
them." 

The writer did not wish for the local ex- 
pert's opinion, either. He believed in the au- 



Baltimore 143 

thentlcity of every canvas, and only wished he 
could buy them all. 

The new Baltimore risen from the ashes of 
1904 is praiseworthy but not picturesque. 
The energy, however, and the progressiveness 
behind it are an essential part of the town's 
character. They had the first water-works 
here, the first lighting by gas, the first tele- 
graph, and the first great railway. And it is 
just this blend of the enterprise so generally 
termed Northern with the easy Southern ac- 
ceptance of the pleasant things of life which 
gives Baltimore its special note. These and 
another perfectly individual thing, the town's 
fashion of being a great port of the sea. 

Baltimore is, if one may put it that way, the 
most inland of places at which you may take 
ship. Though through at least half the town 
there is the pervasive sense of salt water and 
sea-borne traffic, it is not of the Atlantic that 
one thinks. It is true that Baltimore's ships 
plow the waves of that and other, remoter, 
oceans. But Baltimore is the Chesapeake 
Bay's. 

There Is a pretty little park called Federal 
Hill — a fortified encampment of Northern 
soldiers during the Civil War, now a pleasant 
sunny promenade, with grass-plots, trees, and 
flowers in huge stone vases — from which you 
get the best view of the harbor, the Patapsco 



144 American Towns and People 

River stretching away in many miles of long, 
lazy curves toward the great bay. Below you 
lie sailing craft, and down where the channel 
deepens you can catch sight of the funnels of 
great liners. At the left the harbor ends in a 
narrow basin, almost enclosed by the land, and 
there at the levee the bay steamers lie. Every 
morning and evening they start, big boats for 
Norfolk and lesser craft for every branch of 
that wonderful great bay, for every broad 
river that penetrates tide-water Virginia and 
the eastern and western shores of Maryland. 
Small, battered, puffing antiquities they often 
are, these Chesapeake steamers, depositing you 
finally in the middle of the night or at dawn 
at some remote, unknown up-river landing. 
But only by such irregular, almost illicit 
means of communication can you reach queer 
towns forgotten by the railways, old manor- 
houses where one may imagine old furniture, 
old wine, old-fashioned hospitality, and old 
gentlefolk to exist as they did a century ago. 
Indeed, one may imagine anything about the 
Chesapeake and its shores, for they are un- 
known and forgotten. Lately the richness of 
the agricultural lands has begun to attract 
settlers again. Not all of Baltimore's immi- 
gration goes West now. By the water-front 
you may occasionally see a flat-bottomed, snub- 
nosed boat starting, loaded with a whole 



Baltimore 145 

colony of German farming families, for St. 
Mary's County or the Eastern Shore. 

The levee, alive with hurrying passengers, 
and colored stevedores and roustabouts mov- 
ing at lesser speed, is always tempting the 
sentimental tourist to embark upon strange ex- 
plorations. Who would not see the Nanti- 
cote, the Choptank, the Wicomico River? 
Who does not long for the Patuxent, the Poco- 
moke, and the reaches of Tangier Sound? 
Then there are as w^ll the West and the 
Severn rivers, with stately residences on their 
green banks, and Annapolis, that loveliest of 
little capitals. There are boats that go up 
that broad Potomac to Washington, or slowly 
mount the Rappahannock and the York rivers, 
taking you into the very heart of that forgotten 
Virginian country. And always there is in 
Baltimore the haunting sense of this great con- 
tributory province, land of unknown possi- 
bilities and fading memories. 

Concretely, it is the great bay and its shores 
which pile Baltimore's markets high with the 
best and cheapest food our country knows. 
The Chesapeake itself sends "fruit of the sea" 
— to borrow a pleasant Italian phrase — of 
every description, and from a very early 
spring to a late autumn the market-gardens 
and the orchards of Anne Arundel and St. 
Mary's, counties pleasantly named, pour fruits. 



146 American Towns and People 

and the freshest vegetables from a real horn of 
plenty. You may eat Maryland peaches as 
early as June, and Maryland strawberries as 
late as October. And the air above is the 
chosen haunt of game-birds actually eager to 
be roasted over the fires of Baltimore. The 
phrase must be repeated again, ''gastronomic 
center of America." For the grateful city 
quite unreservedly avails itself of its advan- 
tages; it seems to be in a perpetual carnival 
of marketing. 

It is not merely that in Baltimore's clubs 
and in the houses of her aristocracy is "good 
cheer" so abundant as to be famous. Every 
one knows the tales of feasting, and has heard 
the legends of high betting on races between 
favorite terrapin, devoted to sport during the 
half-hour before they enter the pot. Rare old 
wines, incomparable oysters, snowy crab- 
flakes, ruddy canvasbacks — all these help to 
compose a picture of mellow tone. But what 
is even pleasanter to contemplate is the high- 
heaped larder of the humblest Baltimorean. 

Of course it is not possible for the casual 
observer to be behind every kitchen stove and 
under every dinner table in so large a town; 
he must trust to his observations in the market- 
place and to what chance acquaintances of the 
streets and shops can tell him. But he sees 
the humblest baskets go home filled to over- 



Baltimore 147 

flowing with things which are luxuries else- 
where. He knows that the moderately cir- 
cumstanced can eat soft-shell crabs by the 
dozen, and the really impoverished buy 
oysters by the barrel. He will spend happy 
mornings lounging about the low, rambling, 
picturesque markets. Here at dawn country 
wagons still lumber in from the great high- 
roads with "garden-truck," and in the late 
afternoon go home with tired but happy 
parties of marketers in rustic clothes and real 
sunbonnets. Here is a never-ending, cheerful 
confusion, and the satisfying sense that no one 
is going hungry. 

Indeed, Baltimore, among great cities, 
would seem to be the paradise of the small in- 
come. Nothing is perhaps really cheap in 
this country nowadays, but by comparison life 
in the Maryland metropolis is actually within 
the reach of all. Supplies, to employ the term 
most comprehensively, are abundant. 

In all Baltimore there can scarcely be more 
than a few score "apartment buildings"! 
This statement is meant literally, not as a pic- 
turesque exaggeration; though for a New- 
Yorker, for example, it is only by a far flight 
of the imagination that such a condition 
of things can be conceived. Baltimore is, 
broadly speaking, still a city of small houses, 
the pleasantest large settlement of the moder- 



148 American Towns and People 

ately rich and the moderately poor in our 
whole country. There is plenty of money in 
Baltimore, but there are few great fortunes; 
the plutocrats do it there on a modest ten mil- 
lions, and in something considerably less pre- 
tentious than. a New York or Chicago palace. 
The standard of expenditure is low. 

On a modest working-man's income you 
might and perhaps may still live in a delight- 
ful toy-like little red-brick house with fresh 
paint, green shutters, and the whitest of white 
steps. Your house may be only ten feet wide 
and a story and a half high, but it is a digni- 
fied, self-respecting habitation, and your castle 
as no flat can ever be. Near you, in whatever 
quarter of the town you may live, are probably 
pleasant squares planted with wide-branching 
trees, or streets gay with grass-plots, flower- 
beds, fountains, statues. Only in Baltimore 
do such boulevards run through regions of the 
tiniest, simplest houses. All this, if you are 
to view towns with some wish for the well- 
being and happiness of humanity, makes 
Baltimore a really comforting place. 

There is still more matter for philosophiz- 
ing in these charming slums. To the senti- 
mental tourist it seems impossible to overesti- 
mate the artistic; ethical, and sociological 
effect of the white doorstep, which in both 
Philadelphia arid Baltimore is the most prorn- 



Baltimore 149 

inent feature of the urban scene. Ideally, it 
is of marble; failing this, of fair planks of 
wood. There it stands, ready to be scrubbed 
each morning, to be painted each spring. It 
is the outward and visible sign of thrift, neat- 
ness, a kind of guarantee that within, too, there 
are cleanliness and all the domestic virtues. 
And happily for Baltimore, with the excep- 
tion of a few sinister and ill-omened new 
streets in the outskirts, the white doorstep is 
universal. It adorns wealth. It mitigates 
poverty. It will be an evil day for Baltimore 
when she gives up this emblem of her civil- 
ization. 

All that can be said about the comfortable 
situation of the Baltimorean applies, perhaps 
more strikingly, to that of the black Balti- 
morean. There is no intention here to discuss 
the South's problem. But the sight of streets 
of good three-story houses occupied, in appar- 
ent peace and prosperity, by the Negroes, who 
have bought a whole respectable white neigh- 
borhood, is at least interesting evidence in the 
case. And from the point of view of the in- 
dividual quality which it gives Baltimore, the 
money the Negroes get is spent, much of it, in 
heightening the "local color" by the gayest 
garments. 

This is no article comprehensively descrip- 
tive. If it were, there would be a catalogue 



150 American Towns and People 

of old buildings, itineraries — to parks where 
grass-grown earthworks of the war of 181 2 
sleep in the sunshine, and old manor-houses 
that are now pavilions around which children 
play and idlers like the sentimental tourist 
lounge — and innumerable serviceable hints 
for the stranger. But all that it hopes to do 
is to stimulate some one's curiosity, to detain 
some passer-by, and perhaps to point out to 
some native, whose eye has grown dull from 
custom, what a delightful town he lives in. 
Indeed, all over the country there is great need 
that justice should be done to the indigenous 
sights. For so many years we have done 
ample justice, and more, to Europe, that the 
moment may be coming to pause occasionally 
by the side of some lovely fragment of our 
own past, to meditate upon the fact that the 
unnoted years as they go by are making us an 
old country, and that over the face of our civil- 
ization is creeping a richer, more romantic 
bloom. Some day that famous traveler from 
New Zealand will be prowling among our 
eighteenth and nineteenth century relics. Is 
it not to be hoped that before he discovers us 
we may discover ourselves? And as a begin- 
ning must be made somewhere, why not at 
Baltimore, sitting at once modestly and 
proudly by her great bay of Chesapeake, and 
putting pleasantly before you her long history 



Baltimore 151 

of an American town? She can prove to any 
one who will give her half a chance what a 
good, a dignified, a charming thing it is to be 
an American town. 



Is There a West? 

THE Eastern heart dilates immediately on 
crossing the Mississippi. You have been 
told that the air is freer and fresher; that the 
old, silly, social stiffness is to drop from you 
in the warmth of an indigenous bonhomie; 
that every fellow-passenger is a potential 
friend, even perhaps for life. And all this 
really is so; there is a social magic at play 
even in the Pullman car, and the train, flow- 
ing westward, leaves behind it a black cloud 
of Eastern inhibitions, like a trail of smoke. 
Then gradually you realize that the new 
friends who have so unconventionally and so 
hastily clasped you to their bosoms are all also 
Easterners, intoxicated with the breeziness of 
the plains. This first gives you pause. 

Some cynic of the smoking-room tells you 
that Los Angeles is the metropolis of Iowa and 
backs up his paradox by figures proving that 
a great part of its citizens originate under the 
government of Des Moines. Once your sus- 
picions are aroused you are, even during the 
railway journey, intent upon anything which 
might serve as proof that there really is a 

153 



154 American Towns and People 

West. These indications are not too fre- 
quent; the continent was, only lately, crossed 
with so poor a result as only three prairie-dogs 
sighted, and one superannuated cowboy of 
about eighty, who was obviously either a sur- 
vival, a mere museum piece, or some decrepit 
Easterner galvanized into this fancy-dress 
parade by his memories of Buffalo Bill. The 
West suddenly becomes shadowy and elusive. 

There is, of course, a Middle West; it is as- 
tonishing to find that it now extends as far 
as Utah, where in Salt Lake City an enter- 
prising junk company proclaims itself "the 
largest in the Middle West." The West, if it 
exists, has already been pushed beyond the 
High Sierras. It only remains to discover 
whether or not it has been shoved into the 
Pacific and safely out of American life. 

The West, in the old sense of anything 
cruder, less civilized, rougher than the East, 
is unquestionably gone. There is a bathroom 
to each hotel bedroom, and the younger Eng- 
lish poets lecture in all the smallest towns. 
It takes an eagle's eye to find the traditional 
lack of cultivation, and few Easterners, at any 
rate, have eagles' eyes. This question of "cul- 
ture" may as well be disposed of now and 
flung out of our way ; it impedes our westward 
progress. As you advance toward the Pacific, 
"culture," if anything, only takes on a more 



Is There a West? 155 

passionate, almost exacerbated quality, as 
though its possessors were determined to prove 
to the scoffing how brightly the piously 
guarded flame burns on the sunset altar to the 
muses. For decades daughters of the Cali- 
fornian aristocracy have been educated in 
Paris at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. 
The French note is indeed firmly struck in the 
West. You find small children, who, reared 
by foreign governesses, are more at ease with 
the Latin languages than with their own. 
And, to choose but one very symptomatic ex- 
ample, nowhere did the temporary cessation 
lately in U Illustration of the publication of 
the latest plays upon the Parisian stage cause 
greater discomfort and emptiness of life than 
in California. As for the volumes of our 
latest poets and vers-libristes, they lie even 
thicker upon library tables in California than 
in Kansas. Universities dot the plain, and 
one of the world's great libraries is soon to be 
among the orange-groves near Pasadena. 
Culture Is certainly not treated rough near the 
Pacific's shore. 

Bret Harte was, and Alfred Henry Lewis. 
Their West is gone. Yet there remains Cali- 
fornia, which, though certainly not Western 
as we once used the word, is most Californian. 
And Californianism Is something as amazing 
and as dififerent as Westernism can ever have 



156 American Towns and People 

been In that earlier day. It is a subject which 
would well repay years of loving and intent 
study, and demands, indeed, space and some 
epic gift of style, yet must be treated here 
briefly and as best may be. The gospel of im- 
pressionism is in the end the only defense of 
any alien writer attempting to describe a social 
landscape; he sets the thing down as it looks 
to him. 

The Californians, in spite of their compara- 
tive hauteur in the Pullman, are accessible 
enough. Many of them, even on the transcon- 
tinental trip, may be "met." Indeed, they 
travel freely, constantly, and easily to and fro, 
making nothing of four nights out to Chicago, 
and training their infant progeny, as may 
richly be observed in the train, to the same 
happy facility of movement. (It should be 
said, parenthetically, that as far as that goes, 
all over the country motherhood seems merely 
to incite American women to travel, by prefer- 
ence in sleeping-cars.) These returning Cali- 
fornians have been East for various alleged 
purposes of business or pleasure. But it is 
really as missionaries that they have gone, to 
bring the bright gospel of Californianism to 
those benighted races which still persist in liv- 
ing east of the High Sierras. 

The universal delusion of the Pacific slope 
is that California is heaven. And indeed 




Traces of old Spain have a winning, half pathetic charr 



Is There a IF est F 15^7 

there is so much to support the theory that it 
merits calm and judicial examination. The 
beauty of the Californian landscape is indis- 
putable and heavenly. The combination of 
sea and mountains with the adorable valleys 
which diversify it beneath an almost perpetu- 
ally cloudless sky, the great woodland regions, 
the majesty and wonder of the High Sierras 
— all these are unrivaled, unmatched by any- 
thing in our land. There is a curious Medi- 
terranean quality in the country; one loses one- 
self inevitably in golden memories of Greece, 
of Italy, and of the sunburned coast of Spain. 
Something classic, too; under that crystalline 
air everything is sharply modeled. Marble 
temples should crown the hills, and in the 
glades nymphs disport themselves. Claude 
should have lived to paint this land, to do jus- 
tice to its serene perfection. 

Serenity is perhaps the most striking char- 
acteristic of the Californian scene — the sun 
shines, a faint breeze blows gently, and the 
hills lie in the clear light as if nothing on them 
had stirred since they were first chiseled in 
brown or green. There is nothing wayward 
or mysterious about the landscape. The air 
is too crystalline to bear upon it tangs and 
odors. You have moments of thinking that 
there is no air; that all California is broad, 
kindly vacancy filled with sunlight and no 



158 American Towns and People 

more. To the sense of serenity is added the 
feeling of remoteness. In certain moods the 
Californian climate, even at its loveliest, seems 
wholly impersonal, if one may venture upon 
that expression. 

The Californian dooryards everywhere are 
a riot of tropical and sub-tropical blooming 
plants; perhaps nowhere in the world is there 
anything like the lushness of their growth and 
the profusion of their blossoming. To any 
flower-lover these are gardens in paradise. 
Yet in no sense is California the tropics. 
Even when the days are hot the nights are 
most often crisp and cold. There is no 
languor in the air. The night breeze does not 
whisper of the dark magic of the South, of 
hot passions and unbridled pleasures. It is 
not, in short, the Californian zephyrs which 
fill the Californian divorce courts. Instead, 
they seem clean, properly sterilized, even cold- 
storage airs. 

The Pacific, too, a calm, cold ocean not 
much fretted by traffic, adds its curious note 
of aloofness. It sends forth fogs, but some- 
how they carry no hint of salt. And in days 
of sunshine when it sparkles sapphire blue it 
seems somehow to exhale no breath. You 
never "smell the sea" as by the Atlantic's 
verge, and, though you well know that rotting 
seaweed gives forth that odor, you miss it on 



Is There a West? 159 

this western shore. The oceans you have 
known seem playful children, by turns gay and 
irritable, by comparison with this monstrous, 
lovely, inhuman sea. If you are by fate pre- 
destined to Californianism, you find in this 
eternal changeless quality a suggestion that 
happiness, too, may be everlasting, and that 
behind the mountains you have left forever 
change and whim and anxiety and all the re- 
sponsibilities of the past. 

The first impression of California must be 
for every one a sense of release, whether it be 
merely from the winter climate of Iowa or 
from the carking cares of the eastern seaboard. 
Every one is, as it were, under a new flag' and 
a new name, ready to forget the past and keep 
clear eyes fixed only on the future. Here 
every earthly care may be sloughed of¥, except, 
perhaps, the pangs of love. And as for physi- 
cal ills, these should easily be disposed of. 
On every hand there are faith healers of all 
[varieties, divine healers, nature healers, and 
child healers, these last an agreeable novelty 
ranging from ten to fourteen years in age, but 
competent, no doubt, as only an American 
.child can be. 

I The Californian population has been re- 
cruited from all parts of the country and, 
though happy in this new environment, still 
bears traces of its origin. A Boston lady, 



i6o American Towns and People 

lately viewing a parade in honor of the sover- 
eigns of Belgium, said it made her feel at 
home to "see all them silk hats"; yet she was 
doubtless a converted and ardent Californian, 
finding this in her old age a pleasant shelter 
from the east wind. 

One of the pleasantest things about Cali- 
fornia (perhaps, after its natural beauty) is 
the simplicity of life so widely prevalent there. 
Of course there are plenty of enormously rich 
people, and quite enough extraordinarily gay 
and fashionable. Yet in the end it is the para- 
dise of the common people and the small in- 
come. Even when the immigrant to Cali- 
fornia comes with work in his mind it is so 
often some sublimated and poetic industry like 
orange-growing which has lured; the culture 
of that golden fruit, with Mexicans or Japa- 
nese doing the manual labor, is an ideal, easy, 
and Arcadian occupation for any one. 

The bungalow should be the emblem of 
California, it represents the state at its sim- 
plest and most engaging best. It Is the great 
triumph of native art, triumphantly ugly 
sometimes, sometimes triumphantly gay and 
coquettish. When the architects of other 
states, less bungalowish, need models they visit 
the Pacific coast for inspiration. Indeed, the 
Californian bungalow is the prettiest imagi- 
nable proof that there is a modest and simple 



Is There a West? i6r 

and self-respecting life to be led in Arcadian 
surroundings, embowered in bloom, and that 
the servantless home is both decent and agree- 
able. 

In this matter of the elimination of the ser- 
vant — and so of the servant problem — if one 
may trust the report of Californian house- 
waives, the state has gone further than others in 
the direction desired by all advanced and 
radical advocates of the suppression of class 
distinctions. Broadly speaking, they will tell 
you, there are no servants in California. It is 
hard to believe of the palaces, though you hear 
yarns of mid-Western millionaires assisting 
their wives with the dishes or sweeping out the 
gorgeous corridors of their castles. In the 
two-room bungalow (three rooms make it al- 
most a house) a servant would only be in the 
way. 

How can one fear any future social convul- 
sions once one has learned how delightful it is 
to eat in the kitchen, in a charming little stall 
with benches, like those in the Old Cheshire 
Cheese in London, only now trig and gay 
with white and colored paints. Every most 
modern device for the harnessing of gas, 
water, and the electric current you are apt to 
find in the tiniest bungalow temple of the 
simple life. Why dislike washing the clothes 
when a machine does it? What is ironing but 



l62 American Towns and People 

play when the ironing-board lets down from 
the wall at the touch of a button and an elec- 
tric iron, ever hot, stands temptingly to your 
hand? 

Of course there are plenty of rich people in 
California — the sight-seeing automobiles take 
you past miles of "homes," all th-e seats of lum- 
ber, paper, packing, chewing-gum, or sawdust 
"kings," as we so delightfully term all our suc- 
cessful business men in America. But the 
really exciting and significant thing is to go 
past the hundreds of miles of "homes" of those 
humble people who are not and never will be 
"kings," never, perhaps, be masters of any- 
thing but their own souls, but are leading a 
serene, neighborly, American existence. It is 
in this mood that the bungalow seems the solu- 
tion of all the difficulties of even a revolution- 
ized future. California seems somehow to 
offer every tired human creature from that 
humming, tormented East a refuge and a new 
chance. 

The simplicity of life pervades the whole 
social structure. There are in the Californian 
cities large general-market stores on the main 
shopping streets, just next the jewelers' and the 
picture-palaces and the milliners' modes de 
Paris. There is an enormous deal of market- 
ing in person, and, incredible as it may sound 
to Eastern readers, there appears to be some at- 



Is There a West? 1 63 

tempt to attain low prices in the belief that 
they will attract Californians as high prices do 
New-Yorkers. After doing your marketing 
you may repair to dine, at about five-thirty or 
a leisurely and fashionable six, to a cafeteria, 
where again self-service is the desired goal. 
These establishments are enormous and in that 
vast, flashing elegance of style which they have 
borrowed from the hotel "office." There are 
luxurious waiting-rooms where you keep ren- 
dezvous with the party with whom you are to 
cafeteer. Bands blare away, and in certain 
advanced futuristic establishments there are 
balconies with easy chairs where even those 
not dining are welcome to sit and enjoy the art 
of music. 

Nature-loving is of course a cheap and 
simple pleasure anywhere, but it peculiarly 
fits into the scheme of Western frugality and 
soulfulness. Of course California has no 
monopoly; even in central Illinois bands of 
nature-lovers now go forth on Saturday after- 
noons to caress trees. But probably never be- 
fore in the same area were so many almost pro- 
fessional devotees of the Great Mother as on 
the Pacific slope. There is, of course, a vast 
deal of rather windy talk upon the subject, 
and a strong disposition to dilute it with a 
vague religiosity. Even rich and fashionable 
ladies at Santa Barbara are apt to yearn a good 



164 American Towns and People 

deal over the beauty of the landscape, spiritu- 
ally to fondle Rincon, the local mountain, 
and, in short, to feel that this close contact 
with nature is making both soul and body very 
lovely. 

But there is a side simpler and more engag- 
ing. There is an extraordinary proportion of 
the inhabitants of California which knows the 
wild places — they are always astonishingly 
near the centers of population — and has been 
near the mysteries. The coming of the good 
road and the bad car has facilitated this. The 
migration in the summer to the High Sierras 
of thousands of family camping-parties, in 
overloaded vehicles of the many kinds which 
may be generically grouped as tin cars, is an 
epic of democracy. They live long weeks 
really close to that so famous heart; a young 
lady was heard in the autumn complaining 
that she couldn't seem to cook at the sea-level 
— she had learned the art during a long sum- 
mer twelve thousand feet up, where water 
boils at a lower temperature and is much less 
hot! Camping and all the pioneer crafts are 
still a real part of the life of a true Californian 
from childhood on. 

Even week-ends and Sundays are used in 
pleasant outdoor expeditions. In spite of the 
automobile, the Californians can still walk. 
Of course they do not use such an old- 



Is There a West? 165 

fashioned expression; they "hike"; this new- 
word, as Boy Scouts have already found, 
makes a thing that had grown dull a real 
pleasure. The railway and trolley stations 
late Saturday afternoon are an amazing sight. 
They swarm with boys and girls in "hiking" 
costumes of khaki. The young ladies are all 
in trim, tight knickers, to be distinguished 
from the young men only by their superior 
shape, by their beauty of countenance, and 
by the students' caps in bright colored 
velvet which surmount them. There are un- 
doubtedly more young ladies in knickers in 
California than anywdiere else in the world. 
In some cases there is a woman in skirts along; 
this strange raiment possibly indicates the 
chaperon, though more often it would appear 
that the expedition is undertaken in that Ar- 
cadian lack of guile which is still so strong a 
national characteristic. Did Daphnis and 
Chloe "hike"? The young ladies are almost 
always, by a mysterious but welcome dispen- 
sation of Providence, small and exquisitely 
pretty — indeed, they look like moving-picture 
actresses, which is, of course, the highest Cali- 
fornian praise. And the whole scene has a 
quality of musical comedy which is gay and 
invigorating. 

Indeed, while we touch this point, it may 
be said that Californian costume, more par- 



i66 American Towns and People 

ticularly that of the male, is very free from 
any conservative or traditional restraint. It 
may be that in the south the mode is affected 
by the presence of a great number of actors — 
a race always sprightly and debonair in dress. 
For example, it is probable that in Los 
Angeles there are more black-and-white- 
check suits per square mile than in any other 
city in the world. Sartorial imagination 
seems positively unbridled; what a French 
tailor would, so accurately, call costumes de 
fantaisie are excessively prevalent, and all that 
can be done with belts and waists and curves 
and gussets and gores and strapped and plaited 
waistcoats is done. Fits are, to display the 
perfect male figure, alluringly snug — a lead- 
ing Eastern authority says that the impression 
he receives is that every one is wearing the suit 
made for little brother! The note, not uni- 
versally but still most commonly struck, is not 
that of stern simplicity. It is actually a fact 
that in one great Californian city a perfectly 
plain white dress shirt is not to be purchased 
in any reputable men's furnishing shop, the 
mode being for a touch of embroidery or plait- 
ing or pique. Dashing fellows, these Cali- 
fornians! 

As bungalows and dress and the whole 
manner of Californian life indicate an eye 
wholly fixed on the future, so does the Cali- 



Is There a West? ibj 

fornian language. English as she used to be 
spoken is in process of being scrapped in Cali- 
fornia — or perhaps it is only that institutions 
which never existed before demand names as 
fresh as themselves. "Cafeteria" has, of 
course, now a nation-wide use, but there is also 
an "Eateria" and, in one instance, welling 
straight from our strange, turgid, national 
fount of humor, a "Palace of Fine Eats." 
"Grocerteria" is very much in use everywhere, 
for a shop where "self-service" is in vogue. 
"Shoeitorium" and "Shinerium" are delight- 
ful and easily understood, as is "Vegeteria" 
for a wayside vegetable-stall. "Hometeria" 
as the designation of a real-estate office is per- 
haps fancy spun rather fine and flung rather 
far. But for a stroke of individual inventive 
genius it would be hard to beat "Rabbi- 
torium," the mart for these succulent animals. 
The language never grows rusty out West. 

The Spanish past of California, is, of 
course, much advertised and carefully con- 
served. The little towns and the string of 
missions were perhaps not very important in 
those early days; they must have seemed re- 
mote and provincial to the proud City of 
Mexico. And the relics which one so ten- 
derly and piously visits are, as things go in the 
world, relatively unimportant — in Spain itself 
one would perhaps not cross a very broad 



l68 American Towns and People 

Street to see them. But here in America we 
are hungry for the past, and the Californian 
traces of old Spain have a very v^^inning, half- 
pathetic charm. They complete the romantic 
illusion that these are Mediterranean lands. 

And modern California has done every- 
thing to keep the old Spanish province every- 
where in mind. There are "mission" plays 
and "mission" groceries and "mission" garages 
and, as all America knows to its sorrow, mis- 
sion furniture. That famous and delightful 
novel, Ramona, has become an authentic part 
of California history by now, and every event 
has been given a local habitat so that you can 
make pilgrimages, pretty and romantic, to 
every scene of the heroine's happiness and of 
her final tragedy — a charming tribute to the 
art of fiction. The town and street names 
are so many of them reminiscent of that early 
day, and the Californians, slipshod in their 
English sometimes, are astonishingly careful 
of their Spanish, undaunted by such names as 
La Jolla, for example, and dealing com- 
petently with the aspirate j and the liquid 
double 1. The whole system of nomenclature 
makes for romance, and the presence, as one 
goes toward the south and the Mexican bor- 
der, of increasing numbers of a darker, more 
picturesque race deepens the impression 



Is There a West? 169 

which one has at moments that one is in a 
foreign land. 

The Chinese and Japanese do that, too. 
No discussion shall here ensue of that Asiatic 
problem. Not as economist, but as idle tour- 
ist, may one be grateful for such memories as 
that of a carnation-field in bloom tended by 
a half-dozen pretty little Japanese women, 
bending caressingly over the lovely brilliant 
flowers! 

This, however, is a digression from Span- 
ishness, and the point to be made was that 
earthquakes and speculative builders have left 
little in California of the period between the 
mission and the bungalow. There is one lady 
in southern California who is famous because 
her grandchildren are being brought up in the 
house where she herself was born! There is, 
in short, nothing mid-Victorian in California, 
unless it be possibly some aspects of the 
famous San Franciscan vice — in that city the 
rows of cabinets particuliers which adorn even 
the humblest oyster-house inevitably make one 
think of the Third Empire in Paris and the 
Bal Mabille. 

Reluctantly shall some space be here given 
to this same question of Californian morals. 
It is amusing how cultivated and dashing and 
intelligent it is always thought in America 



170 American Towns and People 

to attack towns as being puritanical. Los 
Angeles was once termed "chemically pure," 
and it still reels from the blow. The lowan 
population would like it to be well understood 
that life has been considerably jazzed up since 
its transference to the coast. San Francisco 
has, on the other hand, been perhaps too much 
advertised by its loving but injudicious 
friends, for it is quite plain to even the tour- 
ist's eye that, instead of being the Isle of 
Cytherea, the place is congested with good 
and respectable women (often excessively 
pretty and smart), and that it goes its way, as 
a busy, lively city should, with not much more 
nor much less of undue gayety than usually 
falls to the lot of towns of its size. Yet up 
and down the length of the state you hear 
philosophical thinkers asserting that Cali- 
fornia saps the moral sense. 

(Here, indeed, one had best not be too sure 
that the wish is not father to the thought. 
There are ladies who have not succeeded in 
being very bad in the East and, arriving at 
full bloom and California about the same 
time, have come with the hope of misconduct 
springing eternal in their very human breasts.) 

It is true that the Californian divorce courts 
are by way of surpassing old days in Reno, and 
that life in many a community proceeds with 
great freedom and vivacity; that one-piece 




A superannuated cowboy of about eighty. 



Is There a IF est ^ ijl 

bathing-suits are the rule, and that, to judge 
by the photographs which embellish the chro- 
nique scandaleuse of the local newspapers, 
neither age nor plainness offers any bar to the 
liveliness of ladies. But at the risk of defend- 
ing Califarnians even against themselves, it 
must be said if the state saps the moral sense 
it is only in so far as it weakens all feeling of 
responsibility and of dependence upon the 
traditions of the past. 

The visitor to California will inevitably ex- 
perience moods in which the whole state will 
seem to him populated merely by people who 
have migrated thither to avoid responsibility. 
He will forget the industries and the rich agri- 
culture and consider the whole state as an idle 
community, unproductive and non-creative. 
He will in imagination see the tributary'' 
stream of money from the working East cross 
the mountains and break into pretty, many- 
colored spray over the Californian lotos gar- 
dens. He will wonder what would happen to 
the West if the machinery of capitalism ceased 
to divert this life-giving golden flow. He 
will revolt at what seems the sterile happiness 
of a whole people. 

It is in such moods that one believes the 
worst stories of the slowness with which Cali- 
fornia awakened to the call of the Great War, 
forgetting how, at home in the East, one was 



172 American Towns and People 

bitterly impatient at the country's lethargy 
and neglecting, perhaps, to inform oneself of 
the splendid achievements of the aroused Cali- 
fornia. Yet the mood, dissipated, will return, 
of longing, even in the Californian sunshine 
and beauty, for the cloudier skies of an older, 
struggling, suffering world. 

Reference has been made earlier to the prev- 
alent delusion that California is heaven. And 
here something must be said, in all rever- 
ence it is hoped, about heaven. The Cali- 
fornian resemblance is to that place of the 
earlier theologies devoted wholly to the mystic 
and rather static pleasures of worship and 
praise, which most of the vigorous modern 
churches reject in favor of an ideal of more 
activity, more strain, more likeness to the life 
of this world, though on a higher spiritual 
plane. 

A Californian might, however, well retort 
that the higher spiritual plane already exists 
by the Pacific's edge. Indeed, the soil of the 
state is as fertile of religions as that of great 
Asia. And, indeed, all the Asiatic cults find 
a welcome there. In grand and beautiful 
temples or in dull little frame houses on side 
streets where a simple home-made signboard 
gives modest publicity to a new religion de- 
vised by the Inhabitant himself, all sorts and 
all doctrines find some shelter. From a Sun- 



Is There a West? 173 

day newspaper, which only partially reflects 
the possibilities of a Californian Sabbath 
morning, is copied out a list of services which 
includes, besides the more orthodox names, 
New Thought, Higher Thought, Metaphysi- 
cal Theosophy of several different schools, 
Pillar of Fire, Old Time Orthodoxy, God is 
Female, and, though it is more a cultural ac- 
tivity than a worship of the Deity, Raw Food. 
By the western ocean all these new religionists 
gather to await the coming of a new day. 
Some of them believe that from the deep 
bosom of the Pacific will arise a new con- 
tinent, like the lost Atlantis. When this hap- 
pens they will be there to step still farther into 
the sunset, and to take possession of a newer 
and better California. 

There is more "soul" in California than 
there has ever been before in the world's his- 
tory. A tailor advertises: "All men wearing 
tailor-made clothes should insist on getting a 
soul with them. Every garment made in our 
shops, including coat, vest, and trousers, is 
provided with a real soul, the something that 
lives forever and the something that is not ob- 
tainable everywhere" 1 

All these western religions are religions of 
optimism; it is only natural that they should 
thrive best in these remote, untroubled airs. 
Their practitioners are relentlessly cheerful; 



174 American Towns and People 

you can tell that almost professional smile and 
that voice dripping with honey even in the 
crowded street-car. Their lilac crystal domes 
stand in fantastic loveliness above the western 
sea. Why, in a land where the present pre- 
sents no cares and problems, should not the hu- 
man heart concern itself with some future life? 
Is California itself not the future life? We 
come inevitably to what we earlier called her 
delusion. Perhaps the Californian serenity 
is what the world is now trying for. In that 
case our West is a great mile-stone on the 
highroad of the human race. And when hu- 
man cares are adjusted, then, as now, her hills 
will turn green and brown and then green 
again. And her sunshine will never have 
ceased to flood her great calm spaces. And 
her giant sequoias will have increased in girth 
an inch or two — Perhaps in time that fabled 
continent will rise from the Pacific's bosom. 
But until a great deal is known about it most 
of us will prefer California. 



The Hotel Guest 

AMERICA invented the hotel and is 
still inordinately proud of it. Europe 
through the centuries produced, it is true, re- 
freshment for man and beast, and comfortable 
phrases about taking one's ease in one's inn. 
But it remained for our country to contrive an 
establishment where, if we may venture upon 
an illogical but perhaps understandable ex- 
pression, one took not only one's own ease but 
every one else's; where privacy having been, 
as far as possible, eliminated, the hotel guest 
lived in a pleasant sociable democratic welter 
of all the classes of the community. 

In one of Long Island's prettiest coun- 
try palaces, surrounded by formal gardens, 
clipped hedges, espaliered pear-trees, and 
pools made sapphire blue by the newest chem- 
icals, filled with the loot of Europe, the main 
living-room has a tessellated marble floor mel- 
lowed with age which the owner whimsically 
announces was secured not in some foreign 
nobleman's residence, but at the demolition of 

the metropolis's once most famous hotel. The 

175 



176 American Towns and People 

imaginative guest cannot tread it unmoved; in 
the dim hours of the night he can hear the 
ghosts of America's great days stirring upon 
what was once its noble expanse, seeking their 
favorite chairs or asking the clerk for wTiting- 
paper. If a simple symbol for America is 
sought, for that American America which 
sprang into being with the Revolution, came 
triumphant and reunited through the Civil 
War and the Reconstruction days and has 
lately uncovered and fanned into flame the an- 
cient fires which still burned at her heart, 
teaching her new foreign-born sons her old 
love of liberty, perhaps nothing better can be 
found than the old hotel office grandiose, al- 
most epic in qualities with its stretch of 
checkered black-and-white marble pavement 
upon which America congregated. It was 
what the Forum perhaps was to Rome, and if 
majestic memories of the lobby of the Grand 
Hotel in Cincinnati, seen in an impressionable 
childhood, are at all to be trusted, about the 
Forum's size. 

The European mind is still completely be- 
wildered by the free-and-easy and unques- 
tioned use of the hotel and all its conveniences 
by thousands who dispense with the formality 
of lodging there or contributing in any finan- 
cial way to its maintenance. A Saturday of 
this last winter the office of one of New York's 



The Hotel Guest 177 

most expensive and exclusive hotels became so 
congested that hoarse-voiced uniformed at- 
tendants kept shouting, "Keep moving," as if 
they were policemen in charge of proletarian 
crowds in the street. At such a moment ac- 
tual guests of a hotel are intruding aliens. In 
spite of all modern improvements and all pre- 
tensions to affording an elegant privacy for its 
guests, the American hotel remains to-day the 
prey of the public, its office the public's lounge 
and rendezvous. 

There have been attempts to keep out of the 
best hotels, not so much the local pulDlic as the 
inhabitants of cheaper hostelries. In spite of 
these, the frugal visitor to New York tradi- 
tionally "put up" at a small hotel on a side 
street and picked his teeth on the old Aster 
House steps. And at the summer and winter 
resorts to this day, guests of the boarding- 
house calmly repair in bands to pass the even- 
ing on the verandas of the best hotels, and it 
is practically impossible to say them nay, so 
firmly fixed in our national mind is the idea 
that every part of a hotel not actually locked 
up is public property. 

To lounge in a first-class office confers a 
certain position. Even in the most modern 
hotels young gentleman socially ambitious are 
said to gain at little expense a most desirable 
publicity by having themselves "paged" (de- 



178 American Towns and People 

lightful word) in the public rooms and restau- 
rants at the most crowded hours. 

Another of the common people's inalienable 
rights is to know who is staying in a hotel, 
hence the pitiless publicity of the register. 
This volume is indeed at times the center of 
hotel social life, its perusal the daily pleasure 
of hundreds. In the earlier days, wits found 
their opportunity here. At Trenton Falls, a 
once famous but now almost forgotten resort, 
this passage in the register was much liked: 

John Graham and servant. 

G. Squires, wife and two babies. No ser- 
vant, owing to the hardness of the times. 

G. W. Douglas and servant. No wife and 
babies, owing to the hardness of the times. 

Even though you neglect the opportunity 
to turn a pretty phrase, perhaps the only way 
to make sure that your name is down correctly 
is to write it yourself. Memories come back 
to all of us of strange mistakes in foreign ho- 
tels. And it is well to remember the dignified 
and respectable Bostonian writer on musical 
subjects whose arrival at Tunis in North 
Africa was recorded in the little local Gazette 
des Ktrangers et du Casino as that of Le Mar- 
quis A — . de Boston et sa Suite. 

The Ladies' Parlor, alas, has gone, to make 



The Hotel Guest 179 

way for the cabaret grill-room where the la- 
dies may smoke and drink pink cocktails; but 
for the better part of that great nineteenth cen- 
tury it was a prominent and agreeable feature 
of hotel life. All the foreign visitors of that 
earlier ante-bellum period — whose inevitable 
books of impressions are an ever more fasci- 
nating store of information as to the manners 
and customs we derive from — were by turns 
horrified and bedazzled by the amiable and 
accessible society in the hotel parlors. Below, 
in the office, the rough male inhabitants of 
the Republic swore and chewed and spat, but 
above, American ladies, beautifully dressed in 
Parisian frocks, held a decorus but animated 
court. In Europe, no such public reception- 
rooms existed, no such nightly assemblage of 
guests inclined to sociability. In Europe, no 
families lived permanently in hotels, and this 
publicity of home life added, for the stranger, 
to the wonder of the experience. 

Miss Fredrika Bremer, a Swedish lady fa- 
mous enough in her da*y, but now quite for- 
gotten, may be quoted to advantage on the 
parlors of the Astor House: 

Magnificent drawing-rooms with furniture 
in velours, with mirrors and gilding, brilliant 
with magnificent gas-lighted chandeliers and 
other grandeur stand open in every story of 



l8o American Towns and People 

the house for ladies and gentlemen who live 
here or are visiting here, to converse or to rest, 
talking together on soft and splendid sofas or 
arm-chairs, fanning themselves, and just as if 
they had nothing else to do in the world than 
to make themselves agreeable to one another. 
Scarcely can a lady rise than immediately a 
gentleman is at hand to offer her his arm. 

The last touch is admirable. This is in 
1849, in what might perhaps be thought a 
roguish period in America's manners, yet it 
is humbly submitted that the picture of the 
Ladies' Parlor of the Astor House compares 
favorably with that of any salon of that eight- 
eenth century in France, the period which is 
said to have been for the privileged classes 
the most agreeable this planet has yet pro- 
vided. Even the most belle marquise could 
have hoped for nothing more courteous than a 
gentleman immediately at hand to offer his 
arm almost before she could rise. 

This is perhaps the point to meet any pos- 
sible challenge as to the importance of such 
facts and such philosophizing. Here is not 
history stately and proud, only some pleasant 
odds and ends which may help to make her 
great pages more comprehensive and more hu- 
man. European history has many collateral 
volumes of gossip and agreeable minor infor- 



The Hotel Guest l8l 

mation. So, too, has our earlier Colonial pe- 
riod. But there is a stretch of this nineteenth 
century to know which better and more fa- 
miliarly would make Americans more at home 
in their own continent, would certainly enrich 
the tone of our national culture, and would 
perhaps even heighten our love of country. 
Nihil Americamim mihi alienum — a serious 
plea is made here that even the times of the 
now despised house with a cupola deserve our 
afifectionate, if half-humorous attention; that 
indeed a record of any of our manners and 
customs, such as is planned in this series of 
scattered articles is, though both light and 
humble, still a genuine contribution, at least 
memoirs, to serve for the writing of our na- 
tional history. 

While there is still time, every one should 
see the Ladies' Parlor of a certain famous 
hotel at Saratoga, still coquettish with gilt 
mirrors and ragged blue brocade, and should 
make the pilgrimage to an equally famous inn 
at Niagara Falls, if only to see the fat old 
leather-bound registers in which honeymoon 
couples with imagination still occasionally 
hunt to see where father and mother, or 
more probably grandfather and grandmother, 
signed the book on their wedding-trip — where 
they, too, may see when Abraham Lincoln 
brought his bride to the Falls. Here is his- 



iSz American Towns and People 

tory intimate and sweet, the grave muse ready 
to make friends with any idle sentimental tour- 
ist. 

The colonial inn, though pleasant with 
memories of travelers by coach and of solitary 
and gallant horsemen, is still perfectly in the 
English tradition. Revolutionary days when 
French officers visited us as they do now, are 
fuller of delightful anecdote. The Marquis 
de Chastellux, on leaving a New Jersey inn, 
writes : 

I observed to Mr. Courtheath that if he 
made me pay for being waited on by his pretty 
sister, it was by much too little, but if only for 
lodging and supper, it was a great deal. 

They had a way with them, did those 
Frenchmen! It was said of the young Prince 
de Broglie, traveling about that time, that he 
"managed very well by kissing the landladies, 
so he got clean sheets and no other traveler 
to sleep with him!" It is interesting to look 
over General Putnam's bill at the Cromwell's 
Head Tavern and notice the curious distribu- 
tion of his expenses. His board cost him two 
pounds eight shillings for the week, his liquor 
sixteen shillings, and his washing ninepencel 

All this European character disappeared in 
the first few decades of the new century. In 



The Hotel Guest 183 

that dark age the Simon-pure American hotel 
with elegant Ladies' Parlors, huge offices, 
shining cuspidors, and rocking-chairs on the 
sidewalk, came mysteriously into being, and 
the foreign traveler was inevitably transported 
with amazement, often with horror, at living 
in daily association with three or four hun- 
dred people. One European traveler asserted : 
"Americans love crowds. There are even 
more twins born there than anywhere else." 
Size indeed developed early. At Trenton 
Falls, N. P. Willis saw with amazement two 
thousand wild pigeons fattening for the hotel. 
The hotels in towns were larger than anything 
the world had ever known before; hotels in 
such resorts as Saratoga were monstrous, un- 
believable. Turmoil came, too; a large hotel 
is described as one of the class "entitled to 
keep a gong," and as early as the 'fifties, bands 
played loudly in the Cape May dining-rooms, 
and hundreds of black waiters marched in 
with each course in military order. There is 
at Cape May a Homeric legend of a battle 
royal between white gentlemen and black 
waiters on strike! 

The foreign visitors expressed horror often 
enough, but the legend of American uncouth- 
ness was, quite obviously, exaggerated to give 
spice to their narratives. In 1843 the famous 
English actor, Macready, records that he went 



184 American Towns and People 

with Longfellow and the Willises to dine at 
what he quaintly terms the "Ladies' Ordi- 
nary" of a New York hotel. 

"I looked for the eaters with knives," he 
ingenuously and honestly says, "but detected 
none." 

Mrs. Trollope, whose attacks on us roused 
such bitterness, is to-day somewhat discred- 
ited. We must simply decline, for example, 
to believe that in her day it was considered 
so indelicate for the sexes to sit together on the 
grass, that picnics were impossible. Indeed, 
do we not know from equally reliable wit- 
nesses that at this same period at the New 
Jersey seaside a gentleman asked a lady, 
"May I have the pleasure of taking a bath 
with you?" as he would have solicited the 
favor of a dance, and that in the waves the 
sexes mixed with a freedom which makes the 
story of the contemporaneous squeamishness 
about a picnic quite improbable? 

In this mysterious period of development, 
early in the century, a new hotel language was 
invented, and strange, inexplicable terms had 
birth. 

"Why do you call me Front?" asks the new 
bell-boy in the farce. "Why don't you call 
me Grimes?" 

"I don't know," the clerk candidly answers. 
"It's always done in first-class hotels." 




The old hotel office was vhat the forum perhaps v\/a.s to Kome. 



The Hotel Guest 185 

A traveler naturally must grow excited 
about something and find fault with some for- 
eign custom. How else is he to know that he 
is abroad? Of this importance, and no more, 
are the anecdotes of visitors recoiling before 
the awful sight of boiled eggs ''mashed in a 
glass" and the remark of Thackeray after try- 
ing his first American oyster, that he "felt as 
if he had swallowed a baby." 

There is no intention here of going into the 
long chapter of American difficulties with 
European hotels. We have been as violent 
over the folly of the French and Italians in 
not serving an American breakfast as ever 
their travelers have been over our eccentrici- 
ties. Any one who has tried to play courier to 
an inveterately American friend can under- 
stand how difficult it is, say, in a remote Brit- 
tany hamlet, to obtain Smithson's Breakfast 
Food, or whatever it is which adorns the home 
table in Kansas City, and how hard it is to 
induce a landlady at Vallombrosa to fry the 
morning beefsteak to a turn. On the whole, 
foreigners visiting us have borne the reversal 
of their immemorial habits with fortitude, 
even good nature. 

Instead of cause for horror, the travelers, 
it is evident, often found a strange, exotic 
charm in the American hotel. The waiters 
were invariably black, the chambermaids in- 



1 86 American Towns and People 

evitably Irish. On the sidewalks in front of 
New York hotels, Cuban planters rocked. 
The society in the Ladies' Parlors sparkled. 
In the dining-rooms Gargantuan menus of 
strange foods tempted and satiated every ap- 
petite. Ice-water clinked and indigestion 
stalked. Pale, precocious children compe- 
tently ordering their own dinner tore soft- 
shell crabs limb from limb, gnawed green 
corn, and consumed limitless ice-cream. It 
was indeed the New World. 

Until Mr. Hoover, quite lately, took the 
matter in hand, almost nothing had ever 
checked our national extravagance, and the 
hotel, as perhaps the freest flowering of our 
institutions, excelled in wastefulness, both for 
the guests and for the casual public. In some 
Florida hotels, up to a comparatively recent 
period, great baskets of oranges for free eat- 
ing stood in the offices, while in the early an- 
nals of Wisconsin you may read of a custom 
of serving free whisky to all guests, more 
especially if the house was so crowded that 
many of them had to be put to bed upon the 
floor — a custom that will become more golden 
in memory as the prohibition years go by. 

Even to-day, when time has somewhat 
curbed us, the ideal of the American hotel is 
perhaps a famous establishment in the country 
near New York where you pay a fixed sum a 



The Hotel Guest 187 

day (fixed out of the reach of most of us) , and 
the hotel provides everything you can think of 
to want — cigars, champagne, riding-horses, 
motors, fishing parties, picnics in the moun- 
tain-top, dances, private theatricals, and prob- 
ably even that monstrosity, a feather bed, if it 
suited your convenience. 

The constant outcry of the American tourist 
abroad used to be not so- much against high 
prices as against the itemized bill. Mr. Nat 
Goodwin, in the farce, said, "No, this is not 
my hotel — yet; I am buying it on the instal- 
ment plan." The charge for candles in Eu- 
ropean hotels did more to promote interna- 
tional discord than almost anything else that 
ever happened abroad. At home in America 
we are happy only when soap is provided and 
talcum powder and wash-cloths to take away, 
and sample bottles of mouth wash and tiny 
tubes of cold cream, when the supply of towels 
is limitless and the hot water gushes like the 
Great Geyser of the Yellowstone. At table, 
our ideal is to stoke up between courses on 
celery and olives and salted nuts, and discover 
peppermint candy hiding beside the finger- 
bowl, and to find nothing of all this on the 
bill. 

And yet, in the end, in spite of itself, the 
American public was betrayed. It was found 
that hotel life could really be made more ex- 



l88 American Towns and People 

pensive by charging for rooms and meals 
separately; the old ideal was sacrificed to this 
greater and more alluring extravagance. You 
began to pay for your room alone more than 
in the grand old days of the "two, three, or 
four dollar a day house" you paid for it plus 
three banquets a day, and at meal-times to sub- 
ject yourself to the extortions of an a la carte 
restaurant with alleged French waiters. Of 
course, it was possible to use this new system 
for economy — there were people from the 
Waldorf breakfasting at Childs' — but in the 
main it served extravagance. 

There was a transition period when the two 
plans sometimes existed alongside in the same 
hotel. There is a story, if not true, at least 
agreeably contrived, of Mr. Israel Zangwill 
registering in Chicago and being astonished by 
the clerk's asking him, sharply: 

^'European or American?" 

"I'm European," he replied, "but I don't 
see what business that is of yours!" 

Gradually, however, the so-called Eu- 
ropean plan (in the early idiom it was often 
pronounced with the accent on the second 
syllable) became almost universal in city 
hotels of standing. Even the least refined 
commercial traveler is now revolted by the un- 
New-Yorkishness of the old American plan, 
which is now surviving vigorously only in 



The Hotel Guest 189 

country and resort hotels (and the visitor to 
our crowded watering places knows that even 
there its hold is precarious). 

If the hotel is, as it were, the barometer and 
thermometer of national civilization, it is the 
commercial traveler who most often takes the 
readings. Let no one underestimate his im- 
portance in the nation's structure. In Charles 
H. Hoyt's early farce, "A Bunch of Keys," 
Dolly, complaining, draws a most racily 
American picture. "Ever since the hotel was 
closed," she says, "I've had a most miserable 
time. There's been no drummers along, and 
I've had nobody to flirt with but brakemen." 
She would be glad, were she in a newer play, 
to recognize how her friend has improved the 
hotel. The drummer is the hotels' best regu- 
lar patron. He supports them when the 
traveler for pleasure cannot be counted upon. 
He knows metropolitan comfort and is willing 
to pay for it, or at least to put it on the ex- 
pense account. Some of the new hotels in the 
new South frankly acknowledge their in- 
debtedness. "The hotel the traveling-man 
made possible," is the phrase which calls for 
our gratitude. We must not think of him 
lightly; even in the hotel bedroom the free 
copy of the Bible has been provided by the 
"Gideons," an association of piously inclined 
gentlemen of the road. In England the 



190 American Towns and People 

"commercial room" may still exist for the 
segregation of the fraternity, and it may be 
that in hotels in small Italian towns female 
travelers are still given private dining-rooms 
rather than that they should be exposed to as- 
sociation with the commercial travelers in the 
main sala da pranzo. But in America, the 
most delicately nurtured women gladly follow 
them to the grill-rooms and lounges on the 
New York plan which they have demanded 
everywhere. Tablets honoring the drummer 
should indeed be placed on the walls of every 
new and comfortable hotel. 

The process of civilizing the hotel wilder- 
ness occasionally leads the most sophisticated 
products of New York and Paris to the lone- 
liest frontier posts. In a central New York 
hotel, there was a few years ago a French head 
waiter of that engaging suavity which makes 
life's troubles melt away. Asked one day at 
lunch to convey to the chef a compliment upon 
a really notable supreme de sole, Marguery, 
he sighed delicately and then said : 

"Yes, he is an expert and admirable man. 
But he will not last long as a cook. What will 
you?" he continued with a little weary shrug. 
"How can he sustain his art among a clientele 
which really only wishes a planked beef- 
steak?" 

How can a head waiter last, we may well 



The Hotel Guest 191 

ask, whose advice is sought only to decide per- 
haps between French-fried and hashed-brown 
potatoes to go with the ham and eggs? 
Martyrs each to the cause of American good 
living! The story of a Dieppe boy comes into 
the mind, too, who made a failure as manager 
of an ambitious French restaurant in a pre- 
tentious new hotel in an obstinately ham-and- 
tgg town, whose pretty young wife was made 
love to by a local auto-tire manufacturer, and 
who finally put a bullet through his head, dis- 
couraged, beaten, and lonely for the pretty gay 
town where pleasant little old hotels went on 
in the good traditional way, and where a 
small, sure, happy life would have been his 
had he been content to stay at home by the 
blue French sea. This is probably the only 
record which will ever be made of Raoul. 
There is a mother in France who remembers 
him, if she be still alive. It would be pleas- 
ant if she could for a moment believe that 
America was grateful for the small service her 
boy tried so hard to do for his adopted coun- 
try. 

The transformation which the motor-car 
has effected in the hotels of the American 
country is already a twice and thrice told tale, 
and yet no bird's-eye view of the hotel guest 
can omit the sight of him and his womankind 
in strange masks and hideous wrappings ap- 



192 American Towns and People 

preaching Ye Olde Inne and demanding 
rooms with bath. More wayside taverns have 
been plumbed into a new existence than any 
one could ever have believed Colonial traffic 
could have sustained. As for historic mem- 
ories, they are a cloud, like dust along an un- 
oiled dirt road. One can motor for weeks and 
always lie the night where Washington once 
slept. Our national past has surged back, and 
what with "innes" and tea-rooms, quaintness 
is in danger of becoming a pest. 

There are, however, certain developments 
in this new roadside hotel-keeping which 
should be set down by any serious student of 
our manners. The amateur landlady, an ar- 
tistic gentlewoman in a sage-green woolen 
gown, cut low over a neck artistically hung 
with amber beads, is something which only 
the Anglo-Saxon world can produce. She 
tends to serve food in green bowls and there is 
nothing in the animal or vegetable kingdom 
which with the aid of a bottle of mayonnaise 
she cannot whip into a salad. Her passion is 
for daintiness, in which is comprised, thank 
God, cleanliness. She has a pretty taste in all 
the arts, and indeed a stay under her roof can- 
not fail to be mentally and spiritually tonic. 
She is an agreeable, if faintly comic, figure; 
we should value her as the impersonation of 
a passionate revolt against the dullness, the 



The Hotel Guest 193 

unpicturesqueness of the old American coun- 
try hotel of the last half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. And our new American quaintness, 
brought about by skilled architects, trained 
landscape-gardeners, and sophisticated in- 
terior decorators can successfully challenge 
comparison with any of the Old World's 
cleverness. 

Novelists and playwrights have for some 
time encouraged the hotel run by an eccentric 
local "character." After Frank Stockton told 
us of the Squirrel Inn, some enterprising per- 
son immediately started one so named, and 
now every one who saw the play in New York 
last winter wants to go this summer to a hotel 
kept by "Lightnin'." We are tolerant of 
fantastic landlords; there is a Floridian hotel 
where the host plays Chopin on the parlor 
piano while a soviet of servants and guests 
runs the establishment. 

In the new town hotels, the guest asks not 
quaintness, but a kind of communal grandeur. 
The new establishments are fabulous. They 
provide special floors for bachelors, and, for 
ladies traveling alone, a chaperon-matron. 
They have club-rooms for Spanish-Ameri- 
cans, Indian chefs for the curries, stenogra- 
phers, notary publics, Turkish baths, safe-de- 
posit vaults for the guests, their own artesian 
wells, manicurists among whom Helen of 



194 American Towns and People 

Troy would be unnoticed, roof gardens, sub- 
terranean dancing-rooms, cigarettes for ladies, 
red-tipped so that the lip rouge may not rub 
off and show, private detectives, house osteo- 
paths and divorce la\\'yers, gymnasiums on the 
roof, playgrounds for children, swimming 
baths, jazz and symphony bands, near-bars 
and soda-fountains, their own valets and 
tailors, ladies' maids, packers, ticket agents 
and scalpers, blackmailers, night guides, and 
almost everything except surgeons' rooms for 
major operations and wet nurses for children 
born in the hotel. Once safely within the 
doors of a modern hotel, there is really no need 
of one's ever leaving it, except for the last sad 
rites, and possibly the hotel could take care of 
even these. The hotel is the epitome of the 
nation, even to the elaborate system of mirrors 
and electric signals cunningly hidden beneath 
the velvet carpets by means of which the es- 
timable matrons on each floor are enabled to 
supervise and preserve the morals of the na- 
tion. 

We went through a period when it was no 
longer quite ''the thing" to live in a hotel. 
But now that domestic servants in private 
houses are rapidly disappearing, if not already 
gone, it appears likely that the hotel is about to 
engulf the American world. In New York 
last winter, new hotels were opened at a rate 



The Hotel Guest 195 

which increased the available bedrooms at 
some preposterous rate, perhaps a thousand a 
week, and yet the town every day was filled 
with frenzied, despairing people vainly hunt- 
ing for places to lay their heads at night. 
Waiters struck, imperial-mannered waitresses 
took their place, and yet the one universal de- 
sire in New York seemed to be to live in a 
hotel. When we consider, as indeed we had 
best do, the possible complete passing away in 
the not distant future of all private and 
domestic service, this rush of a whole people 
to hotels becomes epic in quality and signifi- 
cance. American hotels have always put un- 
believable splendor within reach of the whole 
community. And as every change prepared 
by our radicals and revolutionists is in a sense 
an extension of this principle, the hotel is per- 
haps the symbol of the future, a people's 
palace in the office of which the proletariat 
takes its ease. 

Meanwhile, counter to this great principle 
of democracy, hotels, like their guests, have 
developed social position and snobbishness. 
Nowhere so much as in America is the hotel 
a man — or, more particularly, a woman — 
stays at taken as a kind of public manifesto of 
his or her social pretensions. There are still 
left in the land a few hotels dedicated to the 
service of the old-fashioned, elderly rich 



196 American Towns and People 

where decorous, hushed service and meals on 
the old American plan may still be obtained. 
Only recently a visiting Englishman, who by 
some strange chance had gone to one of them, 
asserted that he left because in the whole hotel 
there was no place where his post-prandial 
cup of coffee and cigarette might be enjoyed 
together. In the dining-room he might have 
his cup of coffee, but he could not smoke. In 
the lobby he could smoke, but could not be 
served coffee. 

In the newest hotels, of course, ash-receivers 
are hung over the edge of the bath-tubs, and 
the general tone is well in advance of even the 
future, though, of course, women are per- 
mitted not to smoke. In such establishments 
the tone of fashion is very aggravated, and it 
is curious to notice how nearly impossible it 
is for many of the patrons to endure life in 
any hotel less the mode. In the case of the 
most successfully snobbish of the metropolis 
caravansaries the situation at the outbreak of 
the Great War was curious. Although the 
frock-coated young gentlemen at the desk were 
hurriedly transformed into Swiss, many of the 
waiters suddenly became Belgians and the 
chambermaids irreconcilable Alsatians, the 
boche tone was there and it became one's duty 
to forsake the hotel. For a brief period it lost 
a little patronage. Ambassadors of the Al- 



The Hotel Guest 197 

lied powers were forced to go elsewhere. 
And yet, so desperate was the habit of regard- 
ing it as the only truly fashionable place to 
stay that many of the most passionate pro- 
Ententists remained in spite of everything. It 
was asserted that the hotel was filled with Ger- 
man spies and that valets from the Wilhelm- 
strasse went through your luggage regularly 
every day. One martyred American gentle- 
man was forced to confide the packet of his 
personal letters from British royalty to the 
care of a lady who put them in her country 
safe-deposit vault. And yet, in spite of perse- 
cution, it did not occur to him to change 
hotels. 

What does this prove except what passion- 
ate devotion a good hotel may inspire in its 
guests, and, indeed, all the members of the 
surrounding community? A very prominent 
New-Yorker got his start in the world when 
in Chicago he wrote for a local paper a thril- 
ling account of how one bitter January day 
the clerk at the newest hotel had met the com- 
plaint of an Englishman who could not get 
the water in his morning tub cold enough to 
be invigorating, by having great blocks of ice 
placed in it. The story was conceivably not 
true, since water drawn in mid-winter from 
Lake Michigan might un-iced well bring a 
glow to the most vigorous British body, but 



198 American Towns and People 

all Chicago was delighted at this humorous 
and fantastic statement of how an American 
hotel stood ready to provide whatever the 
guest demanded. It is no bad idea for 
patriots to rally round the American hotel. 
It has been one of our country's great con- 
tributions to the modern world. 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 

ENRAPTURED visitors to our Pacific 
coast sometimes wonder why a Icindly 
Providence sheds upon that land eternal sun- 
shine. There is, however, but one answer to 
that question — so that you can shoot the mov- 
ing pictures there. Of course you can shoot 
the pictures elsewhere, even in New York, 
though the weather often shows an incompre- 
hensible disregard of what is really due them. 
But many other things happen in New York; 
indeed, one is often in danger of forgetting 
what is of real importance in the world. 
This is not satire; it is only the movie point 
of view, amazing, but quite natural. 

They make the pictures at a place called 
Hollywood — the name may be considered as 
symbolic, since there are also activities else- 
where. Now Los Angeles, which is the best- 
known suburb of Hollywood, indeed only a 
few miles away by the trolley, is rapidly be- 
coming one of the largest cities in the world. 
We must of course wait for the census to be 
sure, but it has quite possibly already passed its 

199 



200 American Towns and People 

rival, San Francisco, and it confidently pre- 
dicts that it will soon have the most numerous 
urban population west of the Mississippi. It 
is not claimed that all these people are in the 
movies; there must be hundreds of thousands 
of unfortunate creatures there who have no 
connection with them. But the pictures are, 
for all that, the one preeminent industry of the 
great town ; they are its obsession, its sun and 
moon. 

In Los Angeles there are a few cave-dwel- 
ling ladies (to borrow a Washingtonian 
phrase) who, deeply intrenched in West 
Adams Street, the local Faubourg St.-Ger- 
main, still struggle to maintain the idea that 
one may be Angeleno and yet be scornful, or 
even ignorant, of the movie world. They are 
magnificent, but they fight a losing fight. 

They gain no support from the distin- 
guished visitors from out of town, who indeed 
fly to the studios like homing doves. And in- 
deed when real royalty arrives, as nowadays 
may happen in a republic, they know quite 
what it is in California they want to see. 
Only recently several thousand amiable and 
blameless school-children waited in the broil- 
ing sun for hours, massed in the form of the 
stranger's national flag, while some miles away 
at the world's heart a real king and queen met 
even more real movie kings and queens, whose 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 201 

rule knows no boundaries. Blood is indeed 
thicker than water. 

Of course in the social fight against movie 
people there are naturally dark and desperate 
stories of dissipation always abroad. If she 
believed them, no lady, faubourg or otherwise, 
could fail to react unfavorably. But such 
legends grow only too easily. We cannot be 
quite sure that the stars give parties so wild 
that at regular intervals during the long night 
the local police pass through the rooms and 
tearfully plead with the hostess to moderate 
the gayety of the guests — of course no mere 
policeman would dare give actual orders to a 
really important movie artist. If such parties 
take place, those who attend them may be 
felicitated upon seeing Babylon and Imperial 
Rome revived. But rigid investigation dis- 
closes the fact that many a Hollywood social 
evening consists merely in the decent yet pleas- 
urable experience of hearing some moving- 
picture director tell the other guests how great 
he is. In any case these rumors of an ex- 
tremely full free life scarcely stem the tide of 
stellar popularity. 

It is in vain that gallant golfers rule that no 
moving-picture actor shall join their most ex- 
clusive club. The movie artists merely found 
a new club, and with the loose change in their 
pockets buy expensive land and lay out a new 



202 American Towns and People 

course. What are trifling changes in the land- 
scape to them? Any day they may see the 
tangle of a sub-tropical garden modified by 
the studio landscape specialists so that it be- 
comes the rocky path in the Canadian North- 
west where the hero and heroine first meet and 
love. 

It is equally useless for proud and reaction- 
ary owners of furnished houses to refuse to let 
them to lovely little blonde moving-picture 
queens. All these ladies have to do is to tele- 
phone somewhere and give the order, and on 
some hill near by palaces rise in the next week 
or month or so. Why should not the builders 
from the studio do the job in their off time? 
What is even an imperial villa to men who 
have perhaps just that afternoon finished Cleo- 
patra's boudoir where soon the lovely star will 
entice the world? The houses which owners 
decline to rent to the moving-picture people 
are pointed out to you as among the historic 
sights of the region, but even on the "Seeing 
Hollywood" automobiles they excite only de- 
risive laughter. 

It is not being worldly-minded to say that 
it is absolutely no use trying to treat as lepers 
those who are rising upon an irresistible tide 
of success. It is a little as if you stood upon 
the bank of the Mississippi which was so in 
flood as to threaten to engulf your home and 




Stimulating a vampire with strains from Strauss. 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 203 

snobbishly said that you did not care to make 
the acquaintance of a river so common and 
possibly so wayward. 

You may possibly, at a Los Angeles dinner- 
party, keep the conversation off the pictures 
while the soup is being served; after that it is 
difficult. As to the people on the street-cars, 
in the cafeterias and the hotels, they shame- 
lessly adore the topic. They turn to the movie 
stars as sunflowers to the sun. From ten thou- 
sand thousand altars incense burned to the 
favorites streams toward the unstained Cali- 
fornia blue. And the United States postal 
service might reasonably excuse its breakdown 
by making a statement as to the number of 
letters received daily by the adored ones from 
every quarter of the civilized and uncivilized 
globe. 

A good day will bring by the morning post 
to a really beloved movie actress as many as 
eighteen hundred and sixty-seven letters from 
unknown remote worshipers. And there are 
times when the chief secretary for personal 
letters and her corps of undersecretaries and 
stenographers faint beneath the burden. The 
letters are infinite in variety; they range from 
those of simple admiration and gratitude for 
assuagement of soul, to the definite statement 
that the writer h leaving East Esopus by the 
ten-twenty train on Monday and would like to 



204 American Towns and People 

marry the object of his affections as soon as 
possible after his arrival by the Santa Fe on 
Saturday. The colossal scale of the movies 
may be somewhat guessed at by the fact that 
there are always at the Los Angeles hotels 
gentlemen who have just come to marry the 
leading movie actresses or to reclaim the 
lovely but evil vamps. 

Parenthetically, something more should be 
said about these letters which are read, 
answered, and then turned over for study and 
tabulation by the business-office experts, who 
are, by this time, more widely learned in hu- 
man nature than the professors of psychology 
in our colleges. The "appeal" of each star is 
reduced to figures, and the results guide the 
future choice of plays for the protagonist of 
this correspondence. Some odd things are 
discovered. It is asserted that a certain 
famous and virile gentleman is proved by the 
statistics to be loved chiefly by ladies between 
forty-two and fifty, and that consequently his 
scenarios must be constructed especially to de- 
light this age in the sex. Another is the chil- 
dren's darling. Another the ideal of "clean- 
cuf" American youth. It is quite possible 
that there are figures available which would 
show what chiefly is the delight of cocaine- 
users or of superannuated clergymen. The 
point is that from the peaks of Hollywood 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 205 

fame one sees the horizon burst, and can view, 
as in an Einstein straight line, even the Antip- 
odes. If anywhere here the movies may 
seem to be taken lightly, it is only from in- 
competence to handle the epic quality which it 
is so freely admitted they have. 

Never before, perhaps, in the world has so 
strange a social landscape existed as in Holly- 
wood, never a scene so tempting to an am- 
bitious philosopher. In a world where the 
study of royalty in full bloom is becoming in- 
creasingly difficult, one need not repine; the 
picture people live on an eminence and in a 
solitude which was unknown to royalty even 
in its prime. Sovereigns of the old day had 
power, but from the modern point of view 
their publicity was not well managed. In- 
deed, publicity in any real sense has never 
existed until the movies made their favorites 
known to the world. 

Imagine yourself sojourning in, say, some 
native village in central New Guinea, where 
the inhabitants repair from their wattled or 
otherwise exotically constructed huts in the 
scantiest attire to the local picture-show; you 
would find that they had not heard of Alex- 
ander the Great or Julius Caesar; that they 
knew nothing of Napoleon, George Washing- 
ton, or Abraham Lincoln; that they con- 
ceivably were unaware of Kaiser William, or 



2o6 American Towns and People 

even of Mr. Woodrow Wilson; but that every 
untutored savage of them — man, woman, or 
child — knew the name and the look of the 
well-beloved comic of the films. Of this 
young gentleman, for example, it is now pos- 
sible to say things that it was never before pos- 
sible to say of any one. He is the best-known 
person in the whole world, and he is better 
known than any one has ever been in the 
world's whole history. 

Another great man is said to have a clause 
in his contracts that his salary shall be auto- 
matically raised so that it shall always be 
larger than that of any actor in the world! 
Such thoughts are vertiginous! 

Not only are the movie artists the best 
known; they are, it would appear, the most 
necessary people in the world. The most 
violent revolutionist does not conceive of any 
rearrangement of the world, any dictatorship 
by the proletariat, which will not leave the 
movie favorites on their thrones. If such un- 
precedented creatures present any resem- 
blance at all to ordinary human beings, as in- 
deed they do, it can only be explained by the 
natural and ineradicable niceness of their na- 
tures. 

You cannot prevent modesty, like a shy 
violet, from blossoming even under the Holly- 
wood hedges. One adorable goddess cor- 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 207 

reeled an admirer who was asserting that she 
was the best-known person in the world. 

"No," she said, prettily, ''I don't think I'm 
more than the second, or even perhaps the 
third, best-known person in the world." 

True modesty, it must here be passionately 
protested, has never consisted in ignoring all 
the facts in the case. Why, in the interests of 
an obviously false humility, blink at the truth? 
This new royalty is indeed amazingly demo- 
cratic. 

The court surrounding a movie king or 
queen is of course informal and untitled except 
as the masseurs, the scenario-writers, the pri- 
vate valets, maids, and secretaries, the special 
interviewers for the movie papers, the trainers, 
the Eastern authors temporarily in captivity, 
the decorators of sets, the teachers of dancing 
and rhythmic movements, the professors of 
swimming and diving, the masters of the ken- 
nels and the royal stables, the architects in 
ordinary, the beauty and scalp specialists, and 
so forth endlessly, may be considered as hav- 
ing titles. In addition there is, of course, the 
cloud of unexplained and devoted friends who 
always gather around a throne and pour forth 
acquiescence in every gem of thought that falls 
from the royal lips — "yes-men" they are some- 
times termed in the local vernacular. Into 
this category also fall minor actors and ac- 



2o8 American Towns and People 

tresses, and even extra people, all of whom are: 
glad of any chance to learn how to behave: 
when they, too, shall in time become royal — 
a hope within the reach of all. 

However veiled from the general public's; 
eye, the life at court of a king is singularly 
open to the courtiers. Queens have, of course, , 
always delicately withdrawn into a certain 
privacy. But for kings there is always the ex- 
ample of Le Grand Monarque with his grands 
et petits levers du roi, and Louis XIV pub- 
licly putting on his breeches is no more amaz- 
ing than one of the athletic stars, at the close 
of the day's work, running, boxing, jumping, 
and finally being massaged in presence of the 
full court and to its soft, pleasant, adulatory 
murmur. 

All this, however, it must be repeated, 
though not taking place exactly in privacy, 
happens far from the great beating-hearted 
public. Of course you could not have lived 
in Versailles without seeing the Roi Soleil oc- 
casionally flash by in his chariot, and in the 
streets of the movie cities you catch glimpses 
of the great as they break the speed limit in 
their high-powered cars. Even so the inhabi- 
tants of California are more blessed than those 
of any other region of the world. Yet such 
is the perversity of human nature that a small 
boy was heard taunting another in the Holly- 



The High Kingdom, of the Movies 209 

Wood streets with the fact that, although he 
might have seen his favorite star often enough 
in the street, he had never seen him on the 
screen. Such incidents make you realize how- 
special and curious is the distribution of the 
good things in life. 

Of course minor stars and the smaller fry 
generally sometimes seem so thick as almost 
to impede traffic. There are stories, too, 
which are like those of Haroun-al-Raschid in 
the romantic night of Bagdad, or some Roman 
empress bent upon imperial but, so far as may 
here be asserted, blameless adventure in the 
Los Angeles of that earlier day. The really 
great, however, the five or ten or tsventy 
wearers of the purple, do live to some extent 
behind a shimmering veil of mystery. It may 
or may not be in their contracts that they shall 
not dine at restaurants or repair thence to the 
local theaters; at any rate, they rarely do. 
Sometimes, indeed, they may grace a first 
showing of one of their own films, and the ar- 
rival and departure need only the traditional 
crimson carpet to make them perfect. Ordi- 
narily, however, movie stars see movies in the 
studios at private views, of which one speaks 
quite as if they were repetitions generates at 
the Comedie Frangaise, or in private theaters 
at their own palaces where a pleasing surve}'' 
of the work of other artists may be occasion- 



210 American Towns and People 

ally enjoyed, or unfavorably criticized, if in- 
competent. 

Of course, for most of us lesser folk the 
smaller fry are easier to observe. And the 
sight is both singular and agreeable — agree- 
able partly because movie-land is, above 
everything, the land of youth, where success 
may come overwhelmingly before you are 
twenty-one. (What terrible thing happens to 
movie actresses of thirty one cannot imagine, 
but then few have ever reached that extreme 
old age.) The fact that the ideal movie ac- 
tresses are small, dazzlingly blond, and per- 
fectly formed (the type most admired, so it 
was alleged, by the Prince of Wales), makes 
them the most delicious little creatures to see. 
The young men are gallant and handsome, 
and neither sex shows any hesitancy about 
making dress fanciful and gay. There is, too, 
something very piquant about actors and ac- 
tresses who go to work like other people in the 
morning, though they return quite unlike the 
tired business man at his hour. 

All the things you have read about in the 
newspapers do really happen in the Los 
Angeles and Hollywood hotels. You may 
come home to lunch and find that they have 
been shooting a picture in the office and that 
the company in full finery and paint are 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 21 1 

lunching all around your own table. There 
may be, for example, a bride in white satin 
and orange blossoms, lovely ladies in evening 
dress, distinguished old men — Heaven only 
knows what they represent — covered with for- 
eign orders, and once there was — oh, fair and 
unforgettable memory! — a ravishing small ac- 
tress, dressed, for some dark reason, as a jockey 
in pale blue, tight-fitting doeskin breeches, a 
canary-yellow waistcoat, and a smart blue 
broadcloth jacket! The contrast to the re- 
spectable families from the Middle West who 
occupied the other tables near by was piquant, 
and the experience, let us hope, for everybody 
broadening. 

This may seem to be taking the movies 
lightly, but no one can breathe their atmos- 
phere long and not be profoundly conscious 
that some tremendous force is stirring here. 
It is for our generation an almost incredible 
experience to watch the beginnings and de- 
velopment of a wholly new art. It is no use 
for gentlemen with a Broadway past to assert, 
with a pungent oath, that it is not an art, but 
just the "show business." It is, or is going to 
be, an art and a great one, and in Hollywood 
they realize the fact with a kind of vague 
terror. It is a little as if they had somehow 
unloosed a great and beautiful beast and were 



212 American Towns and People 

wondering whether, with their inexperiences, 
their ineptitudes, and their vulgarities, they 
could long hold and control him. 

"We haven't more than scratched the sur- 
face yet," they say in Hollywood. It is a cant 
phrase, and they say it with a light, cynical ap- 
preciation of the fact that it is used too much. 
But they say it uneasily, too, as if some of 
them, who have not become completely mega- 
lomaniac, wonder whether, when the moving 
picture has come to its full development, it 
will still be they who ride the whirlwind and 
direct the storm. 

The newness of the movie in this golden 
land of California is something fabulous. It 
is only about five years ago that the pioneers, 
lured by the promise of eternal sunshine, 
trekked across the plains with their cameras 
and a few adventurous actors who thought 
there might perhaps be something in the pic- 
tures, took barns and such makeshift quarters 
as studios and began to find out something 
about the movies. They are now the old 
aristocratic movie families. Their ancient 
palaces, built long before 1920, hang upon the 
hills, and their wives are dripping ancestrally 
with sables and pearls. 

Before the stories are forgotten some one 
should write the history of this bonanza 
period. It was like '49 and the rush for Call- 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 213 

fornia gold, or like Virginia City when for- 
tunes in Nevada silver-mines were made over- 
night. In January a man was driving a taxi- 
cab, in June he was directing moving pictures. 
In October actors from the East were borrow- 
ing five dollars to pay for hall bedrooms, in 
the spring they were insisting that their em- 
ployers give them what are termed "open con- 
tracts" in which the salary is delightfully left 
to be filled in by the actor himself. Almost 
without knowing it, the movie people had 
stumbled upon unbelievable deposits of the 
precious metal. It seemed to be there for any 
one who chose to pick it up. Salaries became 
princely. Actresses you had never heard of 
were guaranteed twenty thousand a year, and 
directors were counted failures if they fell be- 
low a hundred thousand. And a frenzy of 
spending seized upon every one. Automo- 
biles, pipe-organs in the house, horses, dogs, 
jewels, swimming-pools, and vintage cham- 
pagne! If cigars were not lighted with hun- 
dred-dollar bills it was only because in the 
days of an earlier boom Coal Oil Johnny had 
already done it. 

And the extravagance attacked the business 
end of the business. Economy became some- 
thing almost ignoble, while wild spending was 
thought to be not only a pleasure and a mental 
stimulus to all concerned, but a means of 



214 American Towns and People 

charming the public. The press was flooded 
with wild stories, and the cloudburst of gold 
over Hollywood was seen to break into fine 
glittering spray of a thousand lovely forms. 
It is impossible to spend more money on fake 
"antiques" than was spent in Hollywood's 
studios, to make uglier rooms as settings or to 
admire them more. If one ambitious man- 
ager reproduced Babylon, the next toyed with 
Imperial Rome. And if the first hired a 
thousand supernumerary slaves, his rival 
bought at once ten times that number. It be- 
came the fashion to engage your company at 
full salary before you had in hand the scenario 
of your play, and, even when you commenced 
shooting, to pay salaries for long weeks to 
some one you needed only for a brief scene at 
the end. There are now in Hollywood Eng- 
lish actors who are, as it were, permanently 
and irreparably dazed by such procedure, not 
being able to realize that it all makes up the 
kind of confused, turbulent, passionate scene 
which we in America love. 

All this is indeed but the natural result of 
a business becoming fabulously prosperous be- 
fore any one has had time to learn how to run 
it. If the movies are poor things, as they 
sometimes are, it is because they are made by 
poor people, as they sometimes are. Why 
not? There are not enough good people to go 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 215 

round. And the incompetent and vulgar 
ones, safely intrenched, are not especially 
anxious to evacuate in favor of some one 
better. 

What has just been set down is, admittedly, 
lese-majeste, the only offense of that kind uni- 
versally recognized in our country — Heaven 
knows what fate awaits the writer of such 
words. Even under the Espionage Act you 
may speak ill of anything in America except 
the movies — they are sacrosanct. Even when, 
as in this present case, there is in the criticism 
no wish to exterminate the pictures, only to 
improve them. 

And yet is it not rather in defense of them 
that one repeats that both pictures and picture 
people are still experimental? Fortunes 
come and go. Reputations are made and lost 
in a day. The land is noisy with the building 
of new movie theaters; the populace, like 
starved wolves, wait in lines that would girdle 
the globe outside the doors. It must be again 
insisted that all this is without precedent or 
parallel. Never has any art or alleged art 
been so known, so widely distributed, so popu- 
lar. It is no wonder at all that when you are 
close to the movies you can scarcely see any- 
thing else in the world. The strongest head 
swims at the possibilities of the future. 
Propaganda, we nowadays believe, builds the 



2i6 American Towns and People 

history of nations, and no one can yet guess to 
what extent the movies, once turned to this ser- 
vice, may mold the very destinies of mankind. 
Why should the movie magnates stop at the 
idea of absorbing the theater and the queer old 
spoken drama? Why not add the magazines 
and the book trade, for what indeed is written 
literature but the raw material of scenarios? 
Publicity might well demand the acquisition 
of all newspapers. And when the mind and 
the opinions of the world are well in hand, the 
step to the assumption of all the functions of 
organized government is not so great as to re- 
quire a particularly high-vaulting ambition to 
achieve it. To those who have not seriously 
considered what moving pictures are, such 
talk may seem wild and fantastic. But to a 
movie magnate in Hollywood it should seem 
almost sweetly reasonable. 

If proof of this frame of mind be needed, 
the attitude of the magnates toward any cen- 
sorship of the pictures may be taken as evi- 
dence. There was lately trouble with the 
State of Pennsylvania, which is considered in 
the East a rather powerful commonwealth. 
But, from the talk that went on in Hollywood 
picture circles about its outrageous interfer- 
ence with certain favorite films, you might 
have thought that Pennsylvania was about to 
be ignominiously obliterated from the map. 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 217 

and its territory, like that of a second Poland, 
partitioned between the surrounding states 
which had a more wholesome fear in their 
hearts of meddling with the movies. Any one 
who fears that the pictures might be going 
too far in taking over the complete charge of 
the world must remember that as a nation 
gets the kind of a government it deserves, so, 
too, it probably gets its due in its kind of 
movies. 

Since the movies came there has been more 
"art" in the world than ever before — the most 
impassioned detractors of the film will at least 
admit that if the pictures have not all the 
merits of the arts, they have at least most of 
their faults. There is, in consequence, more 
of the famous "artistic temperament" in exist- 
ence than the world ever had to cope with 
before. And here, with permission, a theory 
will be propounded, that temperament, which 
may well be considered in the figure of a rag- 
ing lion, deprived of its natural excitements 
in the immediate presence and applause of an 
audience, is always in Hollywood hunting for 
some other prey. 

The whole question of how acting Is to be 
achieved with a cold and unresponsive camera 
taking the place of an infatuated public 
might possibly be here discussed. Of course 
there is always a certain public — the director, 



21 8 American Towns and People 

the others of the company, and the few out- 
siders who by hook or crook always manage to 
be present — yet it is not an adequate audience. 
And, besides, the conditions of picture-making 
necessarily permit only a small bit of drama 
to be done at a time. That is to say there is 
no long passionate flow of the story, to warm 
up temperament and sweep the artist emotion- 
ally away. For example, suppose they are 
shooting a great moral-uplift picture to be en- 
titled "The Senses." A beautiful vampire is 
ready in an evening gown of purple chififon. 
Around her middle is bound a small tiger- 
skin — to indicate that she is not a good woman. 
In a minute she will be asked to lead astray 
a fattish, middle-aged fellow who looks like 
a prosperous broker, but not like a devastator 
of female hearts. She has nothing to buoy 
her up, to induce the necessary reprehensible 
emotion, you may suppose. But when the 
camera man is ready a small, rather dirty 
violinist, fully equipped, steals stealthily for- 
ward, and almost under the lovely creature's 
nose draws forth from his instrument the low, 
thrilling strains which immediately inspire 
her to have her will of her victim. 

Never before have the charms of music, to 
thrill a savage breast, or to bring tears to the 
largest, loveliest, forget-me-not blue eyes, been 
so thoroughly recognized. The sister art is 




The reformer is an ever present afRiction. 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 219 

constantly employed, sometimes even at the 
cost of perfect harmony, as when, side by side 
in the studio, a bit of Beethoven is being 
played by a New England ex-school-mistress 
on a melodeon to stimulate the actors in "Her 
Fatal Sin" and a jazz tune super-jazzed by a 
colored quartet so that the hero of a comic may 
with greater comicality fall into a coal-hole. 
It is now even said that one director "cutting" 
a film feels that his temperament makes it es- 
sential that he do so to the melody from a 
string quartet. 

Has any hint been given of why the king- 
dom of the movies is at once so excited and 
so exciting, why personal behavior is so often 
wayward and untrammeled, and why Holly- 
wood at moments has all the more agreeable 
characteristics of a mad-house? 

The assuagement of temperament is not al- 
ways accomplished by music, nor, indeed, cer- 
tain fond delusions of the romantic to the con- 
trary, by vice. Breaking contracts always 
helps, and an occasional divorce from time to 
time keeps one from stagnating. But there 
are simpler ways, really more original. The 
famous star who leaves a standing order with 
one of his secretaries that at five every after- 
noon all engagements for that evening shall 
be, as it were, automatically broken, whether 
he was to figure in them as host or guest, and 



220 American Towns and People 

something fresh and promising be taken on at 
six, is only availing himself of his position to 
gain a sense of liberty and piquant novelty for 
each night's pleasure which we should all of 
us like were we as fortunately situated. 

Everything is grist that comes to the mill of 
temperament, if it is no more than having all 
your meals up-stairs on a tray or wearing 
sables in August. One does one's best, if it is 
only the little actress who lets her fellow- 
guests see that her gentlemen friends always 
call her at least fifteen times to the telephone 
during dinner in the hotel dining-room — a 
matter accomplished by arrangement with a 
bell-boy if anything goes wrong. There is 
one great man who would not consider cross- 
ing the continent without his private band 
which plays after dinner in one of his private 
cars; he is for the moment quenching the fire 
within his breast. Chacun a son gout. An- 
other, a famous comedian, prefers to every- 
thing the liquid eloquence of his favorite "yes- 
men" telling him antiphonally how great he'd 
be in "Hamlet," if only the damn play were 
screenable; and legend, so often apocryphal, 
even says that an agreeable and accomplished 
monkey who inhabits Hollywood and may 
generally be seen whenever a scenario contains 
a good simian part, is himself not averse to the 
pleasures of being interviewed by some hum- 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 221 

ble and worshiping writer for a moving-pic- 
ture paper. 

The need to satisfy temperament is not con- 
fined merely to actors and actresses. There 
are also to be assuaged the great proprietors 
and the great directors who now rival the 
prima-donnas and the tenors of an earlier day. 
Is there, we may well ask, any good reason 
why, when a magnate owner has a big ex- 
hibitor's contract to sign, involving millions, 
he should not be temperamental over it? If 
he should motor by night into the solitude of 
the great hills, and there, alone with Nature, 
comparing her grandeur unfavorably with his 
own, possess his soul and fix his percentages — 
why not he as well as another? 

It is partly by the development of tempera- 
ment that directors have forged ahead so 
amazingly in the movie world. When the 
pictures started it was known that a certain 
number of actors and actresses were available; 
nothing was known about directors. Strate- 
gically they were excessively well placed, and 
they took excellent advantage of their position. 

They have a very amusing photographic 
trick in the pictures. They build, for ex- 
ample, a town, which is to be carried away by 
a flood or destroyed by an earthquake, in 
miniature, with the hills a few feet and the 
houses a few inches high. The camera will 



222 American Towns and People 

make you believe it is life-size. A director, 
directing such operations as these, seems to be 
seen in his right stature, astride the world! 

It has been interesting to see how the 
^'featuring" of directors has kept pace and 
almost outdistanced that of stars. There is 
indeed much reason for this, and justice. 
Theirs is a curiously difficult and complicated 
metier, requiring tact, technical skill, adminis- 
trative ability, and some touch of the creative 
imagination. And yet it is amazing that even 
a director should become so great that the ad- 
vertisements dare declare that a picture of his 
is 

Greater than Words 

Finer than Thoughts 

Deeper than Life 
even though it be, as it probably is, wholly un- 
like all three. Such phrases do, however, give 
an idea of the dizzy heights to which directors 
have now climbed. Here, at the top of the 
world, they would do well to consider not 
merely their exalted position, but its responsi-. 
bilities. It is true that they, more than any 
one else, can make the movie the fine and 
beautiful thing it might become. 

The director in the flesh — often a robustly 
abundant amount of it — is a magnificent sight. 
His silk shirt opens upon an often fine throat. 
His shapely legs are incased in shining Cordo- 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 223 

van leather gaiters — Heaven knows why. He 
moves as a creature of another race. If ex- 
clusion from the local golf club has seared his 
soul, outwardly it has only seemed to increase 
his pride. Fortunate are those, for example, 
who have seen him at a shipwreck scene where 
he courageously orders scores of wretched 
actors and actresses to risk exhaustion, pneu- 
monia, and death by plunging into a boiling 
sea.^ Thrice blessed those who are invited for 
great moments — when in the studio, for ex- 
ample, Cleopatra is to entertain Mark Antony, 
or the Queen of Sheba is to visit Solomon — 
and are permitted to view the glittering be- 
jeweled cohorts marshaled, and to see scores of 
women, each more beautiful than the morn, 
tremble at their master's slightest word. At 
such moments the director is at his best, a 
beautiful yet sinister Byronic figure. Upon 
his scaffolding throne he sits like Xerxes by 
that Eastern sea, or perhaps, with his dark, 
passionate pride, like Lucifer upon one of the 
peaks of hell. He is indeed to-day the pro-, 
tagonist of the movie drama. 

Of course there are authors — one is always 
in danger of forgetting them. They are a 
comparatively unimportant race, since in the 
movies even the best paid of them scarcely 
earn more than a hundred or a hundred and 
fifty thousand dollars a year. Scenario-writ- 



224 American Towns and People 

ing is in its infancy, and tliere is no reason to' 
suppose that in due time the most admirable 
scenario-wrights will not be developed — in- 
deed, they are developing now, doing their 
work direct, as it were, for the screen, invent- 
ing their own stories and their characters and 
putting down their own point of view upon 
the world. The best will doubtless be those 
reared, as it were, in the studios, to whom the 
medium seems neither new nor strange. 
These young people will probably do better 
things than either superannuated hacks from 
that queer old speaking stage, or indeed more 
robust young Broadway playwrights, who are 
merely lusting for the profits of the films. 
All are in danger of discouragement; they 
have moments when the whole business of 
providing material for the pictures is con- 
temptuously spoken of as the "canning-fac- 
tory." And indeed there are moments when 
ineptitude, banality, and vulgarity seem to be 
becoming standardized. But the uneasy sense 
which pervades Hollywood that the public is 
constantly demanding not only more but better 
pictures, should be proof that there is sure to 
be a field some day soon for every one's best 
and brightest creations. 

The term authors is sometimes used to de- 
scribe those who, instead of writing scenarios, 
turn out magazine stories, books, or plays for 



The High Kingdom of the Movies 225 

the speaking stage. And until very recently 
the chief object of movie activities was to pre- 
vent the interference of these "nuts" in the 
Hollywood change of their work into some- 
thing rich and strange for the pictures. It 
may be suspected that the old guard of the 
film world will fight hard before it will ad- 
mit these barbarians, who know nothing of 
"continuity" and such mysteries, into the rich 
inclosure to loot and pillage. Yet it is a symp- 
tom of the uneasiness of these veterans of three 
or four years' service that you begin to hear 
talk even among them about getting the author 
more "into the business." 

A slight beginning has of course been made. 
Authors have been brought in, confined at the 
studios in pleasant, sunlit cells, with chintz- 
covered chairs, and pet canary-birds or gold- 
fish, as best pleased them, and there expected 
to work. It is not quite certain how much 
they have worked — there were also chintz- 
covered sofas. At any rate, there is no real 
proof that they were actually taken behind the 
veil and permitted to know the mysteries. 
But something is stirring in the deep bosom of 
our greatest art; somewhere in that dim future 
one sees that our greatest authors may be those 
who have rid themselves of both the spoken 
and written word. 

Who, however, cares for theories who has 



226 American Towns and People 

journeyed to the high kingdom of the movies 
and seen that gay, rich, wild, struggling, and 
striving world? It is a privilege to have seen 
the human side of royalty; to have learned that 
they, though triumphant, still dream of 
higher efforts, better pictures. And, though 
both cats and authors may look at queens and 
kings and afterward talk a little banteringly 
about it all, both must be deeply sensible that 
to have been received at court is at once a 
pleasure and an honor. Good luck to Holly- 
wood. It is indeed the capital of the world. 



The American Child 

IN a recent ingenious and original volume 
on some eminent figures of the Victorian 
period the author at the very outset says that 
the difficulty in writing the history of that time 
is that we know too much about it. 

"Ignorance," he goes on gravely to assure 
us, "is the first requisite of the historian — 
ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, 
which selects and omits with a placid perfec- 
tion unattainable by the highest art." 

These phrases are hastily borrowed to set 
at the head of this article, not so much because 
they shine more brightly than other epigrams 
with which the modern literary firmament is 
studded as because they seem to give courage 
to a celibate author about to put a rash pen 
to paper for a description of the American 
child. 

The bachelor, unless employed in a medical 
capacity, knows almost nothing of the birth or 
extreme infancy of the personage in question. 
And even of that time when the child begins 
to prattle, and wit and wisdom cascade from 
its lips like pearls, the non-father is only an 

227 



228 American Towns and People 

ill-accredited historian, unless, as Mr. Lytton 
Strachey says, ignorance be an equipment. It 
is singular how easy it is to forget stories about 
other people's children. In these pages can 
be promised none of those anecdotes of little 
Herbert or Eva which enrapture the parent 
and indeed lead him into an emotional morass 
from which he can never clearly see the whole 
race of children, the majority of which are in- 
evitably not his own. 

Here indeed has been made, almost before 
it was intended, the plea of the writer's com- 
petence. Child-study — a majestic term — is 
nowadays a leading, perhaps the leading 
branch of American learning, and in investi- 
gating a great subject many workers are desir- 
able. Close observation, such as a parent can 
give, of the individual specimen is indispens- 
able. But a more disengaged eye will per- 
haps better trace, through the nation's history, 
the rise of children to their present eminent 
position, and judge the processes by which 
they grasped power. The disinterested celi- 
bate may also possibly best judge the tend- 
encies in the opposite direction, toward the 
resubjugation of the race of children, the ways 
in which they themselves are made victims 
of this new wide-spread science of child-cul- 
ture. The American child is not merely a 
small individual, straight or curly haired, and 



The American Child 229 

agreeable or disagreeable as the case may be. 
He is a great and epic figure. On his small, 
unconscious shoulders he bears the nation's 
future; and as a cat may look at a queen so 
long as those anomalous figures decorate the 
world, so may a man who presumably knows 
little enough about children still observe them, 
discreetly and from a respectful distance, and 
believe that his contribution to the knowledge 
of them has its small value. 

It might, too, be urged that a bachelor, even 
in the forties, may conceivably like children. 
But doting parents find it so difficult to believe 
in even this restrained and temperate affection 
that the point will not be unduly pressed. 

In the early days of the Republic the child, 
though produced freely, had no great vogue, 
if one may put it that way. Children were 
an almost invariable accompaniment of mar- 
riage, and that they were generally liked there 
can be no reasonable doubt. But no one made 
any great fuss about them. They were some- 
times, to quote the language of the period, 
limbs of Satan, and this, though it distressed, 
puzzled no one. The doctrine of original sin 
still prevailed, and affectionate parents re- 
signed themselves to beating the Evil One out 
of their offspring. "Spare the rod and spoil 
the child" was a maxim on the tenderest pa- 
rental lips. Religion held out some hope of 



230 American Towns and People 

retrieving these poor, small lost ones. The 
early volumes of the admirable Poole's Index 
to Periodical Literature had an astonishing 
number of entries under the title "Conversion 
of Children." There were, of course, the in- 
credible Sunday-school stories with painful 
heroes and heroines, convinced at a tender age 
of sin, but, on the whole, children appeared 
very little in literature. Not much was writ- 
ten for them and comparatively little about 
them. In their social aspect they were, by the 
grace of God and the discipline of their elders, 
seen but not heard. A grim picture, every 
one must admit. And, though under this 
regime many an unpromising child turned 
into an admirable grown-up — yet as certainly 
many a little one of rare gifts and promise was 
crushed into hopelessness by its harshness. 

The pendulum has swung as far the other 
way now. There was, of course, an inter- 
mediate period. Little Eva in Mrs. Stowe's 
pages is of course a Sunday-school survival, 
but she was followed by Pecli's Bad Boy and 
then those immortals, Tom Sawyer and Huck 
Finn. Even Henry James, who at first blush 
seems out of place in this galere, made Daisy 
Miller's naughty little brother famous. And 
a tale called Helen's Babies was, as late as the 
early 'seventies of the last century, one of the 
first phenomenal best-selling successes. It 



The American Child 231 

was the bad child's moment, the era of the 
etifant terrible. Scenting no danger and 
pleased with its new spirit of tolerance and 
humanity, the American public warmed this 
monster in its bosom. The child, which had 
been an inferior, almost inhuman creature, 
was now welcomed as an equal and a brother. 
No one saw in how few years it might become* 
a superior and a master. 

Henry James, always oversensitized as to 
the American child, felt early something omi- 
nous about it. In some story of a European- 
ized American returning home the hero hears 
in a hotel, and notes with fear, ^'the high, firm 
note of a child." And there is another hotel 
passage of equal significance which is worth 
transcribing: 

Then there are long corridors defended by 
gusts of hot air. Down the middle swoops a 
pale little girl on roller-skates. "Get out of 
my way!" she shrieks as she passes. She has 
ribbons on her hair and frills on her dress. 
She makes the tour of the vast hotel. 

Is one mistaken in detecting here the crea- 
tion of a Frankenstein? 

There are many possible reasons for the rise 
in the value of children. It is always con- 
ceivable that it may be explained on purely 



232 American Towns and People 

economic grounds. As families grow smaller, 
children, now more rarely produced, come to 
have a scarcity price put on them in the mar- 
ketplace of sentiment. We now vie with one 
another in finding expression for their worth. 
A poet and essayist who is even more widely 
read here than in her native England drove 
the point home when she asserted that, rather 
than that one child should ever die of hydro- 
phobia, she would exterminate all the millions 
of dogs, pet an.d otherwise, of the world! Is 
it to be wondered that it became increasingly 
difficult to discipline a race so well thought 
of? 

An English visitor in the middle 'eighties 
notes with grave consternation the difficulty 
American parents have in keeping children 
from swearing and from calling their parents 
by their given names. It would be hard to 
say to-day just how general swearing has be- 
come among our best children, but in any case 
we may be sure that if they swear it is con- 
sidered part of their charm as it is of parrots. 
As for calling father ''Arthur" or "Woopsy," 
that goes without saying. And old gentlemen 
who in the early nineteenth century would 
have belched fire had they been addressed as 
anything but ''Sir" will now fawn upon chil- 
dren, pleading with them to be called 
"Cousin Howard" or "Scootums." Anything 



The American Child 233 

as formal as the old modes of address seems 
rigid and chilling, and likely to lose to their 
elders that approbation by children which is 
now so essential to any self-respect. 

The advance of the child was gradual and 
insidious. As no one realized the momentous 
nature of the change, no one noted it. Of 
course there were outward signs which should 
have warned. Children's dress, for example, 
which had been extremely ugly, became pretty 
and picturesque. The Kate Greenaway books 
which came with the "art revival" of the 
'eighties, made children's clothes delightful 
and children themselves adorable. The efifete 
continent of Europe began to send its styles. 
Small dashing sailors began to appear, and 
ravishing little girls with short socks and bare 
knees. It was the beginning of the end. 

Books about children for children, and, 
more dangerous, about children for grown- 
ups, began to appear. Perhaps it was Little 
Lord Fauntleroy who started it. But there 
was, too, that enchanting volume. The Golden 
Age, The stage played its part, too. Child 
actresses and actors became an important 
feature of theatrical life; their bleating voices 
may still occasionally be detected, though they 
have grown and now assume maturer roles. 
Societies for the protection of children inter- 
vened. But the public would not be balked. 



234 American Towns and People 

Dwarfs were discovered who assumed Infan- 
tile roles; closely shaven (twice on matinee 
days) they even assumed the parts of the un- 
born children in The Blue Bird. Once you 
begin to see that a little child may lead you, 
you are its hopeless and infatuated slave. 
You are, as to the young of the race, on the 
way to being a confirmed Barrieite or a 
Maeterlinckian. 

Barrie has made us see childhood anew. 
In the country where his children play the 
same dew sparkles that lay like diamonds on 
the grass at the world's dawn. There is no 
witchery like his, no such tenderness, no such 
foolish, lovely jokes. We break our hearts 
for some lost, half-forgotten Arcadia. We 
hear the bells that ring in some happy city 
where all saints and angels and little children 
that have died now are. And this poor world, 
as we listen to him, would be, so it seems, like 
Paradise itself, half laughter and half tears, 
if we could only rightly value its youngest and 
fairest inhabitants. 

Maeterlinck, speaking another language for 
another civilization, does not, perhaps, ever 
come so intimately near to us. But he would 
lead us even closer to the mysteries. In his 
dim regions, lit by lovely unearthly lights, 
little children, all blond and shimmering, wait 
to be born. And he would have us vaguely 



The American Child 235 

apprehend the process by which each small 
wandering soul seeks out the mother who shall 
in divine tenderness love it. 

If these two writers only are mentioned of a 
whole school, it is because they are the high 
priests. There is indeed something of the 
quality of a new religion in the modern exalta- 
tion of the child. Once, when men felt the 
need of something gentler and more merciful, 
there grew up in the Church the cult of the 
Mother of God. To-day, does not the child, 
sitting on his mother's knee, smile more en- 
gagingly, and seem to hint persuasively that in 
his innocence is the salvation of the world? 

Sympathy and liking are duly and sincerely 
recorded here for anything that can make the 
world more sensible of the fragile, evanescent 
beauty of childhood. Yet we have a right to 
examine even new religions and see how their 
tenets are to affect our daily lives. If chil- 
dren are human at all it may be dangerous to 
burn so much incense before them, dangerous 
alike to them and to those who swing the 
censers. 

Children were once thought well of chiefly 
because they would grow up to be men and 
women; nowadays men and women are valued 
mostly because they were once children. 
Growing up is only falling from a once proud 
estate. Children come to us trailing clouds 



236 American Towns and People 

of glory, and gifted, too — this is the curious 
point — with some antique instinctive wisdom 
more cosmic than ours, more directly drawn 
from the hidden divine fountains of the uni- 
verse. To adepts of the new cult a child at 
the breakfast-table consuming its cereal nour- 
ishment sits oracularly like the Delphic 
priestess. A gentleman prominent in national 
affairs took this view of his blameless little 
yellow-haired daughter and gravely put to her 
the problems which were distracting the 
world. 

*'I believe so and so,'' he would sometimes 
say, ''but Gracie and the chief justice of the 
Supreme Court think I'm wron^." 

That he often was wrong does not, some- 
how, to one heretical as to childhood's su- 
preme wisdom, prove that Gracie was as often 
right. Of course the father's moderation in 
allowing Gracie's inspired words to prove the 
chief justice rather than himself right must be 
praised; it is more often the other way round. 
A street preacher on a soap-box once shouted: 

"I say, and God agrees with me — " 

Some of the more rapturous child-wor- 
shipers seem a little like this. They say, and 
children agree with them; the coincidence be- 
ing as sure proof of children's wisdom as to 
the soap-box exhorter it was of God's. 

Under the influence of such sentiments edu- 



The American Child 237 

cation has of course been transformed. No 
one can doubt the harshness and too often the 
stupidity of the old school system, and no one 
can help wishing that the acquisition of 
knowledge might be a pleasure rather than a 
torment. And yet the object of education is 
presumably still to educate, its power to amuse 
being supplementary wholly, and we must 
deal with the fact that children in our schools 
do not nowadays much care to work. If 
things do not suit them, they strike — even New 
York has already seen this. From Bolshevik 
Russia comes almost ideal news to children. 
The scholars there establish the curriculum 
and dismiss at their pleasure unpopular 
teachers! They see to their own comfort, too, 
not only by lengthening the recess-time, but by 
establishing well-equipped smoking-rooms for 
the upper classes! Of course this last pro- 
vision may not seem much to the children of 
New York and New Jersey, who, according to 
recent astonishing revelations, are accustomed 
to securing their supply of cocaine fresh each 
day from enterprising merchants who are at 
hand just outside the school gates at the clos- 
ing-hour. But this is only a measure of what 
improvements we may expect when American 
children take the schools in hand. 

Even teachers sometimes, in moments of dis- 
couragement, admit that children don't work 



238 American Towns and People 

as hard as they used to and don't learn as 
much. Is it possible to trace a connection be- 
tween these two facts? Is work really neces- 
sary? Will children, even under the most 
modern system, ever learn the multiplication 
table in sheer ecstasy of joy? Foreign chil- 
dren seem to know more than their American 
confreres; just as grown-up foreigners so 
often seem better educated than we ourselves 
are. Is the difficulty that we still make 
lessons a little irksome, and do not trust 
enough to that innate excellence of the child, 
which would doubtless, when the time came, 
give him knowledge as if by miracle? 

There is a singularly pleasant legend 
(which should be a great favorite with child- 
worshipers) concerning the offspring of a dis- 
tinguished American authority on painting. 
These children, so it is alleged, passed their 
early years wholly art-free, unmolested by any 
knowledge of paintings and their value. 
Their ignorance was abysmal, considering 
whose children they were. Yet their bodies 
were healthy and their minds virgin soil, and 
their parents confident that when the time 
came — 

The time at last did come. When they 
were fourteen and twelve, respectively, the 
little boy and girl were, in accordance with 
their parents' theories, solemnly taken to the 



The American Child 239 

Uffizi Gallery in Florence. There they were 
placed successively in front of the master- 
pieces of the painter's art while gently and 
lucidly, in simple words, it was explained to 
them why these were great and noble pictures. 
Their little minds, unsullied by art-knowl- 
edge, free from the squint which the sight of 
bad painting gives, were able to understand 
at once, to swallow art at a gulp. They re- 
turned home, where a hot bath, a wholesome 
supper, and a night's sound rest invigorated 
them and prepared them for the morrow's test. 

At about eleven in the morning they were 
taken to the Pitti Gallery and, as it were, 
loosed. And then — oh, lovely miracle! — like 
homing doves they flew unerringly to the 
masterpieces there housed, and proclaimed 
their merit in choice English such as their own 
father might have used! This is the kind of 
a story every one would like to believe. It 
seems to take some practical advantage of the 
child's intrinsic superiority to the man, and to 
dispense with all annoying and expensive 
study. 

Unfortunately for the comfort of children, 
few parents have the perfect faith of these just 
noted. The education of children, though 
transformed, still goes on at terrific tension. 
But the work now seems to be piled on the 
mothers rather than on the children. The 



240 American Towns and People 

most feeble-minded mother who is capable of 
bearing a child must now be thoroughly 
familiar with all its reflexes, complexes, and 
inhibitions. While she is washing the dishes 
she must prop up the latest volume on pre- 
natal influences against the pan. She must 
swim out upon a vasty ocean of science and 
theory. She must search her soul to know 
whether breakfast contained a safe blending of 
proteins and vitamines, and she must be sure 
that the union suit of underwear she has 
chosen for her darling puts no strain upon the 
dorsal muscles. With Freud in hand she must 
read her child's dreams as did priests of old 
the entrails of the sacrifices, trying to discover 
whether the pain in the little one's heel is there 
because his great-grandmother, in girlhood, 
dreamed of Achilles. 

Such labors and such devotion immediately 
suggest that motherhood has now perhaps be- 
come a greater thing than childhood. May it 
be, after all, that the child's chief value in our 
American life is that it brings into being the 
American mother? When you see in Wash- 
ington the fine building which serves as Head- 
quarters of the National Congress of Mothers, 
you realize how serious a matter it is to go into 
the profession of child-bearing. 

There is perhaps a good deal of mock 
heroics in all this talk of the mother sacro- 



The American Child 241 

sanct — peasant women accustomed to plow a 
field the day after a child is born might well 
think it a confession of the frailness and 
cowardice of the modern city-dwelling fe- 
male. Yet it is well to read over occasionally 
the pages in which Theodore Roosevelt, never 
a puling sentimentalist, ennobles and dignifies 
motherhood. And no one can seriously 
quarrel with any Better Babies campaign. 
(The law and practice as to child labor in 
some parts of the country are crying for the 
attention of the merciful mothers of Amer- 
ica.) Even Malthus, a much-maligned phi- 
losopher, did not preach race suicide — only 
fewer, and so better, children. Indeed, to 
hand a better world on to a better generation 
is succinctly the great and holy duty of man- 
kind, and the most bemuddled mother over 
her scientific volumes, however comic she may 
be, is never quite a figure of fun. 

Nevertheless, it may be permissible to sound 
a warning. Scientific knowledge on the 
mother's part must not be allowed to rub the 
remaining bloom from childhood. The cab- 
bage, even when it begins its career under a 
bell glass, and has its roots warmed with hot- 
water pipes within the soil, probably does not 
much mind being kept from sounding its 
native field-note wild. The incubator babies, 
too, at Coney Island or the county fair, do not 



242 American Towns and People 

concern themselves as yet with the romance 
and poetry of their rearing. (What a char- 
acter the incubator baby, free from all senti- 
mental memories of parents, makes for Mr. 
Bernard Shaw!) But most other modern 
children, though they be potentates, find life 
by no means all near-beer and skittles. They 
are pestered at every step by new theories 
learned in the child-study course for mothers. 
Once upon a time there was a very beautiful 
little girl with golden locks who lived like a 
princess with her very modern and scientific 
father and mother in a large house upon a 
little hill where many wild strawberries grew. 
A well-meaning but unscientific grown-up 
guest (a wretched bachelor, of course) sug- 
gested one day, when he happened to be break- 
fasting alone with the little girl, w^hom he 
very much liked, that she and he should spend 
the morning blissfully gathering the sweet- 
perfumed little berries which they would eat 
at lunch with the thick cream which came 
from the nice cow in the barn. The lovely 
little girl said, "No, thank you," but her lip 
trembled. Then the foolish old bachelor 
again explained and urged his delightful plan, 
upon which the lovely little girl burst into 
tears and rushed from the table. The scien- 
tific mother a little later explained that by the 
doctor's orders the lovely little girl had never 



The American Child 243 

in all her life been allowed to eat any un- 
cooked fruit! 

Now the doctor may have been right; in- 
deed, an amendment to the Constitution of the 
United States prohibiting the eating of raw 
fruit by minors may be urgently necessary. 
But we must learn somehow legitimately to in- 
clude picking wild berries in the activities of 
childhood. It is humbly suggested that per- 
haps if the stewing of the fruit might have 
occurred on a brick stove which the child had 
helped build, over leaves and twigs she her- 
self had gathered, something of the old 
glamour of wild-strawberry adventure might 
have clung to it still, as the grown-up had re- 
membered it from his own boyhood. 

Especially in reference to rural pleasures it 
is to be hoped that the children of to-day may, 
when they are older, have some of the ro- 
mantic memories that their elders now have. 
Perhaps it is only a trick of advancing age, 
but the swimming-hole in the brook seems to 
have a quality which no bathing establishment 
with a pool and pergola and hot and cold 
showers can ever have. During last autumn's 
war thrills one of the great metropolitan news- 
papers for days filled columns with letters 
from elderly contributors who debated about 
the corn-silk cigarettes of their youth, or those 
they made of the dried leaves of the wild 



244 American Towns and People 

grape. It seems somehow as if the modern 
child's country were too well equipped. 

Of course in the country nature study pur- 
sues the child. A parent or other instructor 
at his elbow forces him to learn how to tell 
the wild-flower from the birds — the phrase is 
by now traditional. And one suspects that, al- 
though they provide delightful Indian and 
cowboy suits, they even want him to learn 
from some handbook how to play the Sioux 
brave and from some recommended diagrams 
how to build a robber's cave. But childhood 
and the country are an almost invincible com- 
bination; it would be hard to ruin them. 

It is very pleasant to think of all the summer 
camps throughout the land where boys, and 
girls, too, both rich and poor, may learn some- 
thing of woodcraft and simple living and 
open-air sleeping. Nothing can be more 
agreeable than to see a company of Boy Scouts 
starting ofif for a week-end hike to the country, 
where they will camp, and catch and fry their 
own fish, and perhaps lie on beds of pine 
needles. On the whole, perhaps the modern 
way is just as good. And many parts of the 
country have a moving-picture theater fairly 
accessible and a soda-water fountain at hand, 
so that the most exacting child who is not con- 
tent with the simple pleasures of field and 
stream may not lack its evening amusement. 



The American Child 245 

There is, however, quite seriously, the 
definite danger that all this psychic mode of 
educating may kill every little eccentricity, 
every little imaginative quality in a child 
w^hich may be different from the standardized 
imagination for children as found in Barrie 
and Maeterlinck and recommended in the 
mothers' handbooks, and so in the end produce 
a monotony of personalities. It cannot be too 
pleasant for a child to be too closely studied, 
especially when it comes into the odd, de- 
licious, happy, sad days of adolescence — it is 
not pleasant, when a fellow is embarked upon 
his first love-affair, to find mother at hand 
with Chapter XIII of her favorite volume on 
child-psychology, demanding the most awk- 
ward and embarrassing confidences, and study- 
ing her son as Fabre might an amorous insect 
under the microscope. In the old days chil- 
dren were sometimes very unhappy because no 
one was trying to understand them; they must 
nowadays be sometimes unhappy because 
every one is trying to. Privacy, both of per- 
son and of thoughts, may be as much their 
right as ours. We must be careful how we 
fumble with their souls. 

Apprehensive grown-ups must, of course, 
remember that some of the simplicity and ro- 
mance of their childhood has necessarily gone 
forever. No danger can now threaten a child 



246 American Towns and People 

equal to that of the old high bicycle. No 
little boy to-day can make it the goal of his am- 
bition to drive the horse-car down the tracks 
in Main Street; there will soon be children 
who have never seen a horse. These same 
nervous people may also safely count on the 
resistance, conscious and unconscious, of the 
American child itself. It is amazing how 
racy of the soil that person is. He reverts to 
type as do the lower animals or garden flowers. 
Train him with foreign masters or governesses 
as you like, he has moments when he snaps 
back. His speech is an example. He may 
for a few of the tenderer years, if he is care- 
fully isolated, be master of the low, well- 
modulated tones of England. But the mo- 
ment he goes to school his speech gains at once 
the tang of the streets, or of the gutter if you 
wish to be emphatic. His nasal tones cut the 
circumambient air and his R's rasp. It is 
something stronger than himself, some germ 
that floats everywhere. Later, at college or 
after, he may discipline his tongue into the 
best manner of our own pleasant x\merican 
language. But he must have sown his lin- 
guistic wild oats on the Bowery. 

The American child resists manners, too, 
and sometimes even growing up does not alter 
this frame of mind. Here in America little 
boys shake hands and little girls courtesy verjr 



The American Child 247 

much in the way of animals trained by fear. 
And no American child will, of its own voli- 
tion, ever say, "Good morning," or, "How 
d'ye do?" to any grown-up. Foreign chil- 
dren seem by comparison unnatural little mon- 
sters of courtesy. And the Latin languages, 
elegant and concise, give children speaking 
them an exaggerated appearance of poise and 
polish. There was an undue amount of 
clamor and shouting in a uniformed line of 
Venetian school-boys on their way to church, 
and a child of perhaps ten spoke up. 

''La calma, signoriT he urged, with mock 
seriousness. "Calmness, gentlemen!" 

An acid little girl of six, on the tramcar 
at Rome with her nurse, passed by a building 
where huge posters advertised an exhibition 
of modern painting. 

"That wouldn't interest me," remarked 
nurse. 

"It interests others," answered the little girl, 
coldly. 

Perhaps we may be glad that our children 
are more natural. There is a kind of wild- 
ness still in the American soil. And children, 
who are born conservatives, have a deep- 
seated love for what is indigenous. They are 
the custodians of the American note. A lit- 
tle ten-year-old boy at our most fashionable 
seaside resort comes to mind. He was one 



248 American Towns and People 

of those millionaire babies, fabled in the Sun- 
day supplements, reared in luxury, domiciled 
in palaces. And when the Fourth of July 
came there was a terrific scene (from which 
he emerged victorious) because the one thing 
he insisted on doing was to sell a pale, watery 
lemonade for a cent a glass from a small stand 
which he was going to erect outside the great 
gates of his father's place on Bellevue Ave- 
nue! Within him deep called to deep; by 
instinct he knew that he could not rightly 
grow up as an American unless he had at 
least once performed all the traditional rights 
of American boyhood, as poor boys and coun- 
try boys and slum boys were everywhere per- 
forming them. 

Has the statement been too long delayed 
that American children are the finest in the 
world? They are not to be held responsible 
for the theories and follies of their elders. 
They want their own way — naturally, if they 
can get it. They are not much concerned 
with their complexes. They probably do not 
take their art-life very seriously — little girls 
may enjoy dancing barefoot on the green- 
sward, but they probably think it silly to speak 
of it as expressing their personalities. If they 
have more liberty than they once had, let us 
merely hope that it makes them happier. 



The American Child 249 

And let us start a modest catalogue of their 
merits. 

To begin with, they are probably the clean- 
est children in the world. We are the most 
bathing race since the Romans; we exceed 
them in the number of tubs if not in the fervor 
of our ablutions. St. James the Less, so the 
Golden Legend records in his praise, from 
childhood "never baigned" and was by this 
known to be holy. Even among his fellow- 
boys he would obtain less recognition now. 
American children should be the healthiest in 
the world. They are the most generously fed, 
and nowhere in the world is the battle more 
fierce against the germs that threaten them. 
Latin children may sit up with their parents 
and make a good meal at nine in the even- 
ing, enlivening it with a cup of generous wine. 
It doesn't seem to hurt them. But our dar- 
lings, though we allow them great liberty in 
manners, are in bed early. They resemble St. 
James the Less in that he never drank wine, 
mead, or cider. Their milk is certified and 
their water boiled. Their food is chosen for 
them according to articles by popular doctors 
in the women's magazines. It would be sheer 
perverseness on their part not to be well. 

And we adore them, frankly and without 
embarrassment. It may safely be predicted 



2^0 American Towns and People 

that children will never be nationalized in 
America, however much their bringing up by 
government agencies might, scientifically, be 
to their advantage. Free love, that goal of 
so many radical futures, may have to be given 
up just because parents, both men and women, 
want their children for their own. Of course 
everywhere in the world there are to-day 
women who are inclined to wish children 
were possible without having undignified re- 
course to a father, so high above all other 
loves does, with them, the maternal stand. 
We have lately on the stage seen Madame 
Nazimova and Miss Marie Doro go insane 
over this wish of the young girl, not at all to 
have a husband, but to have children. But 
American fathers, though little inclined to the 
miracle of motherless children, value their 
oflfspring with a spontaneity and a lack of 
self-consciousness which in many parts of the 
earth would be astonishing. In short, no one 
in America need apologize for making a fool 
of himself over children. 

The American army has given us an en- 
gaging proof of this. In all the reports that 
came from France one of the most charming 
things to hear was the way our boys had made 
pals with the French children. The little 
ones adored these strange, good-natured, good- 
looking men, who had such a passion for 



The American Child 2^1 

washing in cold water and smelled so nice. 
The boys wanted to help the mothers of these 
children; they were not too proud to offer at 
once to do "chores" about the house. They 
made Franco-American friendship a real 
thing. Individuals, companies, regiments, 
adopted orphans. Some day they will bring 
them back to America, and the prettiest, 
sweetest sentimental comedy will be played as 
the French boys and girls grow up — La Fille 
du Regiment done over to suit our case. 

Even in the occupied districts of Germany 
our army, which has been able to resist every- 
thing else, has found it hard to resist the chil- 
dren. Perhaps little Hans and Gretchen 
when they grow up may find it fairly easy to 
think well of us, if they are only allowed to 
cling to their childhood's memories of a good- 
looking khaki-clad American boy holding 
them upon his knee. 

At home the war taught us something about 
our children. They were so sensitive to pa- 
triotism! They were so generous of their 
small funds and their little strength! Thou- 
sands of orphans in France have been adopted 
by school-children here. Across the seas go 
letters, and, when the postal regulations allow, 
shoes and clothing, sometimes sewed by little 
American girls' fingers. And back come gay 
foreign picture post-cards and words in funny 



252 American Towns and People 

childish writing that try to express the grati- 
tude of all France. Little stands along our 
streets where on Saturday afternoon lemonade 
and rather withered nosegays are sold "for 
the French orphans" make you smile, and 
for that instant believe in international friend- 
ships and the future of the world. 

Whatever his family may be, the child of 
foreign parents is an American. And he is 
the great Americanizer. The doctrine he 
carries home from school he imposes upon 
them. We may feel sorry that when they 
might have two languages these foreign chil- 
dren are willing to have only one — American. 
But the sturdy impulse to be real citizens of 
the country where they are to live is worth 
more than the dual ornament of tongues. 
Little Giovanni, who insists on being called 
Joe, and Ignaz, who would like to be known 
as Mike, we should be proud of. 

Are we not proud of them — as of all Ameri- 
can children? Do we not fill our magazines 
with jokes made from children's clever say- 
ings, and cover our colored supplements with 
their engaging doings? (Oh, where in the 
snows of yester-year wanders Buster Brown?) 
Has any mere short chapter a chance to say 
even half that should be said about our dar- 
ling, the American Child? 



The Society Woman 

IN treating of the American "Society 
Woman" we approach a figure epic, yet 
somehow indefinable. It is difficult to say 
just what she is, yet impossible to say just what 
she isn't. She is the glittering figure of 
triumphant Columbia, incredibly lovely and 
well dressed, not only devoted passionately to 
pleasure and the arts, but in the vanguard of 
a thousand "movements" (for the moment let 
us be no more precise than this as to which 
way they move). She is the arbiter of na- 
tional elegancies and. Heaven knows, she may 
be the guardian of national destinies. Let us 
study her with the means at our command. 

The documentary evidence first to hand is 
naturally in the newspapers. The society 
woman does not shun publicity; she is in it, as 
the French say, like a fish in water, not so 
much rejoicing in the medium in which she 
swims as knowing no other. For the last 
forty years at least the press has been cele- 
brating her. The newspapers should know, 
yet their facts seem strangely at variance with 
those observed at first hand. Even now so- 

253 



254 American Towns and People 

ciety reporters present the view that the ladies 
whom they advertise are a race apart, kept in 
cotton-wool except when they emerge for their 
purely frivolous activities. We still read this 
kind of thing in the papers: "Society girl 
gives up society to study nursing," "Society 
woman gives up society for landscape garden- 
ing," "Society favorite gives up society for 
community work." But the society woman 
never gives up anything, except an occasional 
husband en passant. (And even here, in the 
best circles, a woman does not divorce one hus- 
band until she is happily engaged to be mar- 
ried to the next.) Indeed, the life of a so- 
ciety woman is spent in acquisition rather than 
renunciation. She does not give up anything 
for nursing or landscape gardening or com- 
munity work; sTie merely adds new activities 
to her old. If she takes to the hospital or the 
fields or the canteens, "society" — whatever 
that term as loosely employed by the reporters 
may mean — is already there or soon will be. 
She may be more in society than ever, and the 
cynical may even accuse her of nourishing so- 
cial ambition at the very heart of her altruism. 
The stage, too, is responsible for much mis- 
apprehension on this point. The straight- 
forward, virile hero so often wonders whether 
the bewildering "society girl" whom he loves 
can ever be willing to "give up society" — the 




Women of the highest position feel deeply the beauty of the Bolshevik doctrine. 



The Society Woman 255 

phrase is by now almost traditional — for his 
sake. In a well-constructed play she is will- 
ing, and just previous to being locked in his 
strong Western arms she usually confesses 
with an impassioned revulsion that she is 
"tired of teas." Except among almost over- 
sophisticated writers *'teas" seem the chief, if 
not the only, dissipation of all society women 
but the most vampirish and corrupt. Tea in- 
deed, which is even now often described in 
the quaint nineteenth-century way as "pink," 
is the target for incessant satirical shafts. In 
a recent play of triangular family life, the 
lover, a dissipated fellow, had the habit of 
"teaing" on a regular day every week; this, 
indeed, appeared to be his chief, if not only 
opportunity of seeing the fair one, and even 
here the husband, rushing home to the tea- 
table, as we are asked to suppose fashionable 
New York husbands do, was often present. 
Now, as the lover's attention was wholly pour 
le bon motif as it were, it is only the more un- 
likely that through the years he would have 
been put ofif with tea, and not insisted on lunch 
or dinner. 

Not that society women would not like to 
have men to tea! Young foreign gentlemen 
are generally available and often cozy at this 
hour, but there are never foreigners enough 
and tea-drinking has, as a matter of brutal 



256 American Towns and People 

fact, been successfully resisted by almost every 
native son. 

As for "teas" as social functions, every so- 
ciety woman is ready to give them up, even 
without being importuned to do so by any 
Western hero. To frequent nothing but 
"teas" is to confess social failure. "Teas" of 
course remain a constant and inexpensive 
pleasure and method of hospitality in the life 
of those content to be merely artistic, but no 
society woman worth her salt is content to be 
merely anything. 

If the newspapers and the stage fail to re- 
flect faithfully the richly varied pleasure life 
of the society woman, they do occasionally 
recognize her unbending and tireless physique. 
In a comedy exposing the life of Long Island 
country houses the exhausted male guests had, 
at about two in the morning, sought sanctuary 
as they supposed in the sitting-room of one of 
their number (it is a pleasure to note the rich- 
ness of equipment which permits each guest 
parlor, bedroom, and bath) , but were there in- 
vaded by the charming rollicking hostess and 
the ladies of the week-end party who brightly 
insisted upon bridge till dawn. The endur- 
ance of society women is beyond belief. As 
the crowds pour forth from the theaters it is 
they, clear-eyed and sparkling, who flog their 
weary male companions to the suppers and the 



The Society Woman 257 

cabarets. And they are up in the morning as 
early as the men, regulating their households, 
giving and receiving invitations, hustling their 
secretaries, who, not being society women, are 
sometimes tired, and arranging to cope with 
home charity, foreign war relief, suffrage, art, 
and literature, not to speak of massage, hair- 
dressing, and psychotherapy. If they are ever 
weary they are too gallant to show it. Only 
a year or so ago a lady who had dined, gone 
to the play, supped and danced, insisted at one 
in the morning on being deposited at the Eagle 
Hut where, in evening dress, jewels, and full 
war paint, she proceeded to do her daily duty 
by cleaning up the canteen. Society women 
are indeed an imperishable race — it is not 
probable that in the more lightly working, less 
fashionable classes any such stamina exists. 
Noblesse oblige; and the high resolve to pur- 
sue an exalted career gives courage and 
strength to meet its demands. 

The newspapers, though they may not real- 
ize it, make no great account of exclusiveness ; 
they speak always of being a society woman 
as being really a question only of willingness 
to take up that career. This has made it pos- 
sible for journalists to write of "prominent 
society women" in the remotest, smallest ham- 
let of the land. It is really, in the language 
of the day, no more than the conventional 



258 American Towns and People 

tribute to respectability. In the press it is al- 
ways a society woman who has six ladies to 
lunch, the decorations being jonquils, a society 
woman who organizes the knitting club for 
Esthonian orphans, and a prominent society 
woman who is smashed up driving her Ford 
car over the grade crossing. One must pro- 
test against the theory that all such richness 
of experience is only within the reach of one 
class, unless indeed that class be so broadened 
that all pretense of exclusiveness is gone. 
And though the last decade, including the war 
period, has dealt hard blows to exclusiveness, 
yet it must still be recognized as one of the 
society woman's most sparkling jewels. 

Society, of course, has always existed in 
America, since the stately days of Lady Wash- 
ington, when really great people were, even in 
a world made temporarily safe for democracy, 
given by the courtesy of common speech, un- 
official titles indicative of their being society 
women. Ladies in Philadelphia to-day will 
tell you that they were brought up in a world 
more insistent on birth and sixteen quarterings 
(if that be a heraldic or mathematical possi- 
bility) than any society outside the Viennese 
aristocracy. And, indeed, it may be so. But 
this had no great effect upon the free republic 
of the west. It was not until the newspapers 
all over the country began to exploit New 



The Society Woman 259 

York society that all America, with an eye on 
the metropolis, began to organize itself as the 
sheep and the goats. 

Exclusiveness was the contribution of the 
'eighties to nation-wide snobbishness. The 
idea of "The Four Hundred," a published list 
of those who could be described as really in 
New York society, was a stroke of genius. 
And an even greater stroke was the later re- 
vision of this list to "The One Hundred and 
Fifty," thus publicly expelling into outer 
darkness those who had, by the earlier too 
great generosity, been made household names 
throughout the land. Society, indeed, bristled 
with redoubts, which the ambitious were con- 
tinually storming. There were subscription 
dances with lists artificially and heart-break- 
ingly short. There is an incredible passage in 
the late Ward McAllister's book in which he 
describes how applicants regularly came to 
him, with documents to prove their ancestry 
or their financial standing (or more rarely, but 
happily, both) and plead humbly for recogni- 
tion. These were the days when to be seen at 
a certain great lady's house or in her opera 
box insured a young man free dinners for the 
next month. And it is a scant forty years ago 
that one famous fancy-dress ball of fabulous 
extravagance landed a great family safely in 
the fold where they now have the air of hav- 



260 American Towns and People 

ing originally built the inclosure. For weeks 
before the fateful evening the whole country 
waited — even the humble Ohio agriculturist, 
spitting at the depot store, was fully apprised 
by his newspaper of all there was at stake. 
And even he must have experienced at least a 
relief from strain when it became known that 
all the best people had gone to the party. 
Snobbishness was stimulated throughout the 
whole land. 

But these were indeed simple days, the as- 
sault of society was a clear military and 
strategic problem. Now it is much more 
complicated. Social position is in no one 
hand to bestow; instead it flies like will-o'-the- 
wisp before the pursuer. Even ten years ago 
there were signs of the beginning of the end of 
exclusiveness. About that time a lady, famous 
for her wit and independence, asked a young 
gentlerran, then new to New York, to dine. 
He arrived, as it happened, early, and his 
hostess confided to him that he must be compli- 
mented by being asked to one of her very best 
parties. 

"They tell me," she said, with a detached 
air but an odd mocking light in her eye, "that 
there are only five women in New York who 
are really fashionable. I don't know about 
that, but at any rate they are all coming to- 
night!" 



The Society Woman 261 

The young man glowed with pleasure, and 
his hostess watched him with amusement. 
Ten, not five, ladies came to dinner, all, to his 
poor ignorant eye, equally fashionable! 

There is, of course, one class in the modern 
community which feels quite competent to ap- 
praise social position, even to award it. 
These are head waiters, who in the fashionable 
restaurants herd the elect near the draughty 
entrance (in what to the unlearned would 
seem the worst places). A position with 
waiters is by no means to be despised — a lady 
constantly seen at the best restaurant tables 
stands a fair chance of being ultimately wel- 
comed at the best private boards. Of course 
many ambitious ladies unhappily never ad- 
vance further than the best head waiters. But 
the best head waiters — they may be assured — 
are much more agreeable companions than 
anything short of the very best diners-out in 
society. 

Social position is truly an elusive sprite. 
Foreign observers were wont to say that 
Americans, and, indeed, all the untitled in- 
habitants of all republics, were never sure of 
their position. Ladies in America are dis- 
covering at last that, failing patents of nobility 
or any authoritative list of the Four Hundred, 
one of the best ways of making people believe 
you have a social position is to behave as if you 



262 American Towns and People 

had one. We may be thought to cite a case 
of extreme aplomb in the lovely lady who ar- 
rived an hour late for a dinner-party on a 
night when she had not been asked, bringing 
with her two other guests whom she had taken 
the liberty of inviting, but whose names she 
had forgotten! Of course considerable per- 
sonal charm is needed to carry off this sort of 
thing, but, even so, indisputable social posi- 
tion only could render it attractive rather than 
merely careless and rude. 

Whatever perturbations may come, a 
woman of fashion will always be a woman of 
fashion however Protean her materializations. 
And yet it is fair to say that the old simple days 
of blue-book lists of those in society have gone. 
The war finished a destruction already begun. 
Society is not so much occupied now with 
keeping people out as with dragging them in 
— that is, people who have the appearance, the 
tastes, and the money, and will consent to live 
a society life. The portals are not, of course, 
really left unguarded; there are a great many 
of what might, perhaps, be termed "limbering 
up" exercises which candidates are put 
through. There are parties to be given, com- 
mittees joined, and money liberally con- 
tributed to them. The process, though it 
seems easier, is really longer than of old, and 
in the confused state of society there is always, 



The Society Woman 263 

even when you seem to be in, the agonizing 
doubt as to whether, after all, you really are in 
— in the old days a card to Mrs. Blank's ball 
stuck in your bureau mirror was so much more 
reassuring. 

Reference having been made to liberal con- 
tributions, there is perhaps place here for a 
generous parenthesis on money, its use and 
abuse. It cannot be too often insisted on, in 
any serious study of our best people, that 
money, at least a decade ago, became so plenti- 
ful in America, and especially in New York, 
that it could no longer of itself confer social 
distinction. Time was when to build a palace 
and serve nightingales' tongues for dinner was 
enough. But hostesses became more numer- 
ous than worth-while guests. One of the 
town's very most fashionable women, whose 
own income was only a scant $200,000 a year, 
put it well when she asked, fastidiously: 

"Why should we wish to have what every 
Pittsburgh millionaire can have?" 

Ambitious people with money should not, 
however, unload it too hastily (not, at any 
rate, just on reading the above paragraph). 
It has its uses. Society women still feel a 
warm, pleasant sensation in proximity to a 
large new fortune. But they want to take the 
climber's gold on terms consistent with self- 
respect and dignity. 



264 American Towns and People 

Ten years ago two ladies — Mrs. Doe and 
Mrs. Roe, shall we say? — started to mount the 
New York ladder. Mrs. Doe abounded in 
palaces and luxury. At her table you ate 
nothing in season. At her country house the 
bathrooms contained always eight kinds of 
mouth-wash in rare decorated bottles, and six 
kinds of rouge in gold boxes were provided 
on the dressing-tables. It was occasionally 
suggested to prominent young women of taste 
that they might turn interior decorators, for a 
commission, and do a room or two in one of 
the palaces. At Christmas-time the leaders of 
society sometimes discovered a lovely diamond 
brooch nestling in a bunch of white violets 
with Mrs. Doe's card — this was generally re- 
turned with a statement that the recipient's 
husband did not permit her to receive gifts, 
etc. 

Mrs. Roe lived in a much smaller house. 
Her dinners often did not begin with the real 
Russian caviar. She had no country place. 
Her entertaining was extremely simple, some- 
times just ten or twelve people pigging it in 
her private car to Palm Beach, where as often 
as not they themselves paid for their rooms 
and breakfasts at the hotel. She bestowed no 
jewels, and yet she is now called by her 
Christian name (by the way, both ladies under 
discussion are Christian) by women who have 



The Society Woman 265 

by now quite forgotten that Mrs. Doe ever 
tried to know them. And the simple secret 
is this — that Mrs. Roe subscribed to every- 
body's charity and uplift movement while 
Mrs. Doe did not. No society woman could 
get at Mrs. Doe's money decently, and on any 
other terms no one wanted it. If the reports 
that came in of London and Continental ante- 
bellum society are true, it is humbly submitted 
that the moral tale of Mrs. Doe and Mrs. Roe 
is very much to the credit of our American 
world of fashion. 

Charity and uplift are in the firm grip of 
society women. The newspapers during the 
past years of war have duly noted this; every 
female who enlisted as a Red Cross nurse, 
organized a relief committee, or hoed a radish- 
bed was promptly described as a society 
woman giving up society to do so. There 
was, of course, a great deal of folly in war 
work, a certain amount of what is bitterly de- 
scribed sometimes as making carnival on the 
ruins of civilization. Social ambition led 
many women on, and doubtless a sheer love of 
pleasure organized many a dance and bazar 
for the benefit of the tortured victims of the 
Hun. When the time comes to write the his- 
tory of war relief, a certain number of its 
pages will inevitably be comic relief. It 
would be pleasant, even now, to tell the story 



266 American Towns and People 

of the ambitious lady who failed to get on any 
of the really fashionable war committees, and 
ultimately made a delightful place for herself 
by the fortunate discovery of the obscure but 
deserving race of Uro-Russicks and the im- 
mediate organization of a committee for 
their relief. Such anecdotes prove little. It 
would be narrow and uncomprehending to 
deny the realness and vitality of the emotion 
which set the best-advertised women of our 
country to work. Perhaps the fact that their 
gowns came from Paris did heighten their 
sympathies for France. But, in any case, 
when the whirlwind of our national indigna- 
tion rose to its noble and passionate height, 
these daughters of America were gallantly in 
movement with it. 

The justice, too, must be done them to note 
the fact that war relief sought them as much as 
they sought war relief. The American public 
is the most sensitive in the world to advertise- 
ment and, next to actresses (who still, in some 
hard-shell circles, inspire a vague distrust), 
society women were the best known. A hard- 
headed business man, organizing a war com- 
mittee, knew that.he had to have well-known 
names on his list (and in addition a compe- 
tent salaried office staff to do the work). He 
requisitioned a dozen society women in prime 
condition just as he ordered white paper and 



The Society Woman 267 

blotters and typewriting machines. It almost 
seemed as if the oftener a society woman's 
name appeared on committee lists the more 
valuable it was. So no one should blame them 
if self-sacrificing patriots went on every com- 
mittee that offered. 

If it is the fashion to be patriotic it is also 
in less degree the vogue to be intelligent. 
This must not be confused with being ar- 
tistic. For a long time now society women in 
America have vibrated sensitively at the touch 
of Art. This has been immensely serviceable 
in the civilizing of the American social 
wilderness. When they packed their trunks 
for the homeward voyage from Europe they 
put in, every time, a good deal of taste. So- 
ciety women have learned to deal competently 
with painting, sculpture, furniture, and all 
the decorative arts. They have reclaimed our 
domestic architecture until all over the land 
the new American "homes" average higher in 
taste and luxury than the new habitations of 
any country in the world. They are introduc- 
ing actors to other people who are not actors, 
a movement fraught with hope for the future 
of that race. They entertain artists of every 
description at their tables. They form a large 
support for concerts and they are the backbone 
— as may be seen — of the opera. A long and 
exquisite passage might, it is obvious, be 



268 American Towns and People 

written on the curious fact that high social 
position always goes with a delicate flair for 
art, foreign art preferred. But it was when 
society women annexed intelligence and 
public interests that the old-fashioned mem- 
bers of good society saw the beginning of the 
end. 

The suffrage movement, from the moment 
that it involved the younger leaders, threat- 
ened society with the vogue of intelligence. 
It is nothing now for a woman of fashion to 
be on a state board of lunacy or a commission 
for subtropical bacteriological study or a 
committee for propaganda of American ideals 
in Portuguese East Africa. Society women 
feel deeply on educational and sociological 
questions. Some of them constantly keep on 
the premises an editor or two of some intel- 
lectual weekly or one of the fashionable 
socialists. Women of the highest position 
feel deeply the beauty of the Bolshevik doc- 
trine and burst into tears if any one talks 
of intervention in Russia. When the police 
break up red flag meetings they are sure to 
find some society women in the best boxes. 
It may serve as an encouragement or as a 
warning to revolutionists, who may take their 
choice, but it may be prophesied that if Soviets 
are ever set up in America they will be 



The Society Woman 269 

"Councils of Workmen and Soldiers and So- 
ciety Women." 

This is, of course, the extreme and serious 
view, as all students of society women must ad- 
mit. Things have not everywhere gone so 
far. But the intellect and the war combined 
have, however, already worked revolutionary 
changes in the habits and customs of the sub- 
ject of this article. It is, for example, no 
longer de rigeur to talk all through the opera; 
in fact, to do so is really old-fashioned. Peo- 
ple, if they like, remain till the end with al- 
most no embarrassment; in the old days one 
of the leaders was alleged to rise in her box 
precisely at the same hour, no matter what was 
happening on the stage, and say, with the all 
too sweet air of one already martyred and 
sainted for music's sake: "It's half past ten. 
I should think it would be all right for us 
to go now." 

People even arrive on time for the opera 
sometimes. How old-fashioned already seem 
the days when one of the hostesses most highly 
placed always sat down to dinner on her opera 
nights at the exact hour when the curtain rose 
at the Metropolitan, and complained bitterly 
of the German operas which began at seven 
forty-five, necessitating dining at that uncom- 
fortable hour! 



270 American Towns and People 

Intellectual society women are devoted to 
the theater, too, and often have plans to uplift 
it. But the feeling unquestionably prevails 
that a theater which began at nine or nine- 
thirty could be more easily uplifted. People 
are willing, indeed, to dine early — say at 
seven-thirty or seven forty-five if they are go- 
ing to the play — but somehow even that sacri- 
fice doesn't seem to bring them there for much 
of the first act. 

This picture of society in the ardors and 
suf^ferings of a transition period is, however, 
not meant to imply that ladies live without 
pleasure. Entertainments were smaller dur- 
ing the war; let us, indeed, freely admit that 
they were on a higher intellectual and spirit- 
ual plane, but fairly continuous. An ex- 
tremely pretty blonde was heard lately to re- 
mark, with an engaging naivete: 

"My husband and I dined at home last night 
for the first time in months, and to my as- 
tonishment I find we have an extremely good 
cook!" 

It is just possible to argue of society that the 
more it changes the more it is the same thing. 
It used to be smart to be heavily engaged 
ahead. Now the fashion has changed. One 
lovely creature swears that she never settles 
before 6 P. M. what she is going to do of an 
evening. But as she is always out it must be 



The Society Woman 271 

presumed that enough invitations come in 
about tea-time so that her pleasure is never 
really curtailed. Every one would prefer to 
wait till the last moment and accept the best 
thing that offers; not every one dares take the 
risk. But our charming reformer genuinely 
thinks she is taking steps nearer the simple 
life. 

Even when little dinners were for the pur- 
pose of talking over war work they were still 
little dinners and very pleasant. And it seems 
likely that reconstruction dinners will be 
equally agreeable — if the supply of men holds 
out! 

Here again, as in any article written on 
American society during the last decade or 
two, we touch that eternal and heart-breaking 
topic, the dearth of men. It is bad enough in 
ordinary times, but war made it worse. And, 
as always, foreigners gallantly stepped into the 
breach. The embassies, the committees, the 
various high commissions all contributed. 
Society, when it blazed with anything, blazed 
with uniforms. And later on, as men who 
had seen service began to be invalided over 
here, the supply increased. That many of 
these young gentlemen were crippled and so 
totally defenseless was a fact viewed almost 
with equanimity by women of fashion, deter- 
mined to fill their opera boxes and their 



272 American Towns and People 

dinner-tables at the cost even of tears and 
blood. 

Again, as so often in the past, little censor- 
ship was exercised upon foreigners — it is a na- 
tional weakness. One of the notable social 
successes of the war season in a great Eastern 
city was a sleek swivel-chair hero in khaki, of 
whom his compatriots continue darkly to 
mutter that he was in London a mere clerk of 
sorts with no social position at all. He could 
dine out — and would — eight times a night if 
that were physically possible. And yet his 
simple debut was when a lady, whom a male 
dinner guest had failed at the eleventh hour, 
telephoned a peremptory demand to the head 
of a foreign military mission to conscript and 
send her some one, something, anything male 
that would dine, and she would ask no ques- 
tions beyond inquiring his name when he 
arrived. 

Society women seem indestructible. And 
yet it would be a rash man who would 
prophesy that society is as enduring as its ele- 
ments. Some of these ladies, as has been 
hinted, mean to head the Revolution that every 
one is talking about. Others, with a shiver 
down the spine which is not altogether un- 
pleasant, feel themselves already mounting the 
tumbrils with a sense of kinship to the French 
aristocracy of Louis XVFs day — and it may 



The Society Woman 273 

be guessed that it is the ladies most recently 
arrived in the sacred inclosure of society who 
feel most strongly how like the old nobility 
they are going to be in case of trouble. 
Others, more prudent, are said to be unearth- 
ing the portraits of the honest founders of the 
family, proletarian grandfathers in cowhide 
boots and overalls, and hanging them where 
the mobs can see them at once when they smash 
in the palace doors. Others — and aren't they, 
after all, the majority? — mean to confront the 
future gallantly, cheerfully, and with our 
characteristic American feeling that somehow 
the country is all right and that, whatever hap- 
pens, every citizen has a fair chance to come 
to the top or the front. And that chance is all 
the society woman wants. 

A great deal of nonsense is talked and 
written about society women — probably some 
has been written here. Are they, we had 
better ask, any better or worse than the nation 
at large? An American woman at a great 
party in London was accosted by a foreign 
gentleman whom she could not seem to re- 
member. Was she, he asked, enjoying the 
party? She put up her fan to give privacy 
to an instant of confidential coquetry and said, 
no, she wasn't; there were too many royalties 
present. He laughed and passed on, and her 
horror-stricken companion informed her that 



274 American Towns and People 

she had spoken in this fashion to a well-known 
king! This lady, we may be sure, will be 
quite competent to deal with a new world 
where there are no royalties. May we not 
humbly hope that the society woman will per- 
sist, that she will somehow manage to be 
beautiful and well-dressed and that she will 
continue to do her best for America and to 
insist that America do its best for her? 



627 ^ 



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